FRENCH LITERARY 
STUDIES 



T. B. RUDMOSE^BROWN 




Book "Kb 



PRESENTED BY 



French Literary Studies 



French Literary 
Studies 

By 
T. B. RUDMOSE- BROWN 

Professor of Romance Languages 
in the University of Dublin 




NEW YORK 
JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMXVIII, 



^ 



^ 



Printed at 

ctie c-Atboc pness 

89 Talbot Street 
Dublin 






Co 
Cprtl Cretoequer 



Contents 

Page 

The Point of View 5 

Maurice Sceve and the Poetic School of 

Lyons 28 

Ronsard 32 

The Poets of the Eighteenth Century 47 

Leconte de Lisle 48 

Paul Verlaine 79 

Stuart Merrill 93 

Francis Viele-Griffin m 




PREFATORY NOTE. 

ARTS of the Essays on ** Stuart Merrill " 
and " Francis Viele-Grifnn " are re- 
printed, by permission, from Sinn Fein: 
part of the Introductory Essay from the 
Irish Review : some of the translations 
from Ronsard and Louise Labe and the poem entitled 
Pastel, in the Essay on "The Poets of the Eighteenth 
Century," from T.C.D. I have to thank my friend 
Mr. Cyril Crevequer for innumerable suggestions : he 
has read the whole book in MS. and in proof, and 
has helped me far more than any formal acknowledg- 
ment can indicate. The Essay on ** Verlaine " is 
almost entirely his : all the translations from Verlaine 
are from his pen, and also the poem quoted at the end 
of the Essay on " The Poets of the Eighteenth 
Century.** I am, however, entirely responsible for the 
defects of my work. 

T. B. R.-B. 



FRENCH LITERARY 
STUDIES 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 




THE POINT OF VIEW. 
I. 

HE poets whose profiles I shall attempt to 
catch as they bend over their manuscripts 
or breathe the scented dawn upon their 
thresholds, are alike in one thing only. 
They loved Art with a love as passionate 
as a lover's for his mistress or a mystic's for his God. 
They had no * 'message" and desired none. Did I 
speak otherwise of them, Sceve, in some recondite 
paradise or on some lonely mountain top, united at 
last with his Pernette du Guillet, Ronsard 
enthroned in the Temple of Art, Bertin and 
Delille conversing decorously with the fair 
and fragile ladies of some Elysian Versailles, 
Leconte de Lisle on the fields of asphodel, Merrill in 
his supernal Fontainebleau, would stoop and blast me 
with their everlasting scorn. And how should I meet 
Viele-Grimn's passionate eyes averted sorrowfully from 
Helen of the russet hair or Le Cardonnel's lifted re- 
proachfully from his breviary? 

James Elroy Flecker was right. The place of 
the poet is not leadership : he shows the 



6 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

way to no heroic time to come. He may sing of 
heroes : he does not create them. It is an accident 
that his record of their prowess is their best monu- 
ment. True, it is that — 

" . . . if Pindar celebrate 
Great Hiero, Lord of Syracuse, 

Or Theron, chief of Acragas, 
These despots wisely may refuse 

Record in unenduring brass." 

But it is true only because brass moulders away and 
stone weathers; while, of old, the poet's words handed 
from father to son, and, to-day, the printed record, 
perpetually renewed, are more enduring. Pindar 
celebrated Hiero and Theron because it pleased him 
to do so, not to stimulate other sovereigns to follow 
in their footsteps. 

The millenium will not come a day the sooner for 
all the poets in the world. ** Art for Art's sake " is 
just as meaningless a formula as " Social Art." The 
poet is not (to quote the defunct Pioneer) a " seer . . . 
who uses the things of Art for an ulterior purpose." 
He has no ** ideal of service." But neither does he 
sit aloof in impenetrable glory, making lonely music 
amid the ruin of the world. The poet is no longer 
dishevelled, wild-eyed, half seer and half maenad, 
pointing the road to some imagined Heaven; nor is 
he some mad pontiff led in chains, imagining the 
people bow to him — at the head of the Bacchic pro- 
cession of drunken politicians, thinking to lead them, 
like a bejewelled and bedizened sovereign, helpless 
beneath his tawdry crown. He goes no more in 



THE POINT OF VIEW 7 

fancy-dress to the dancing-hall of life. He has left 
his halo in the cloak-room and lost the ticket. He 
judges pigs, edits papers, writes novels, teaches 
French or geography, and makes up prescriptions 
like the most mundane of mortals. He aspires to 
no apocalyptic onslaught on the portals of Heaven, 
to no spurious demagogic glory : he has forgotten 
to tear his hair and beat his breast and acclaim 
himself the accursed of God. Lamar tine and Hugo 
have had their day. Prophets and charlatans are 
no more. Chateaubriand and Baudelaire have 
come and gone. 

I will not even admit that Art is " for Life's sake.*' 
At worst, this is the cry of the propagandist. At 
best, it only asserts — what is perfectly true and quite 
meaningless — that Art, like everything else, sub- 
serves the ultimate purpose of the universe. 

Art has no purpose. "Art for Art's sake," 
44 Social Art," and " Art for Life's sake " are equally 
untrue. For Art is an effect, not a cause. Art is 
like a sunset or the flowers of the field. Like them, 
of course, it may produce results, but the results are 
incidental and variable. Lovers may kiss the 
sweeter for a sunset or a meadow of buttercups; but 
the sun does not set nor the flowers grow for them. 
Nor are the possible results of Art the reason of its 
being. The sea produces results. Earthquakes pro- 
duce results. They do not seek to produce results. 
They are the expression of the earth in travail of its 
being. No poet, if he was a real poet, ever wrote 
in order to produce any effect whatever upon any one 
at all, not even his lady-love. Art is an inevitable 



8 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

product of a certain set of circumstances : it is one 
of the flowers of life, perhaps the finest. 

The only conceivable purpose of existence demands 
that every unit should come to its full self-realisa- 
tion. No potential value must be lost. The claim 
of every individuality must be asserted. Every one 
of us must strive, unflinchingly, to be himself. There 
is but one unpardonable sin, the refusal to accept the 
destiny we carry within us — the spiritual destiny, of 
course, for the body is but the transient appearance 
of the soul, the passing show of the world's honour 
and reward but the phantasmogoria of the relative in 
which, for the moment, we live. The way to self- 
realisation lies across the chasms of tradition and con- 
vention like the orange pathway spread on the sea 
between us and the sun. Both are, to everyone of 
us, unique, moving as we move, ever present. At 
the set of the earthly sun, our road of light is lost in 
darkness. But only if God set in our soul is the way 
of the spirit obscured, leading to the red gates of the 
transcendental dawn ! Like Lord de Tabley's ** Two 
Ancient Kings,*' we must go — 

** Heroic hearts, upon our lonely way." 

* 'Which of us has his desire, or having it, is satisfied }'* 
To Leconte de Lisle this meant despair. Horror- 
stricken and projecting himself into the consciousness 
of the race, he heard 

**le long rugissement de la Vie Eternelle " 

To us, if we would live, life must be a pilgrimage, 
a journey in search of the fulfilment of desire only 
to be fulfilled before the throne of God. All things 



THE POINT OF VIEW 9 

are, in themselves, vain. No desire can be satisfied. 
We make ever for a receding goal. No kiss is worth 
the getting. Despair waits upon us. But we know 
that through disillusion and only through disillusion 
can the fulness of life come to us. Only through 
desire and the vanity of desire fulfilled can we pass to 
new and nobler desire. The fiery stake and the flam- 
ing crown await us. But were the pyre put out the 
light of Heaven were quenched and deathless Hope 
were dead ! 

The poet, like any of us, seeks to become himself. 
But there is more. Every intense individuality will 
express itself. It will seek to realise its approach to 
self-hood, its "becoming," not only internally but 
externally. The artist's expression is Art. No indi- 
viduality can escape this law. If there is no attempt 
at external expression, there is an inward refusal to 
be oneself, a shrinking from life. Poetry is the out- 
ward expression of the poet's will to be himself. It 
is the effect of the causes that go to make up the 
potentiality of the poet : of circumstances in their 
widest sense, of the epoch in which he lives and by 
which he is, to some extent, conditioned : of the past 
of the particular art in which he seeks expression; 
but, far more importantly, of the obscure and unde- 
cipherable impulses that constitute his personality in 
its inmost sense, of his will to be, that is, of the 
** Drang " which pushes him forward on the road of 
spiritual evolution, on the way towards God. 

To check, or attempt to check, this expression of 
the poet, as of any other potentiality, is to set back 
also his inward self-expression, to commit spiritual 
murder, to be guiUy of sacrilege against God. The 



10 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

critic has not to ask if a poet's expression, his poetry, 
is. in accordance or not with the accepted conventions 
of the world. His duty is to disengage from the 
poet's work the part of the poet's surroundings, the 
part of his historical place in his art, and, beyond 
and above these, the part of the man expressing him- 
self. The poet, then, expresses himself because he 
must. Incidentally he makes beauty. To the world, 
if he says anything, he says : " Take it or leave it!** 
And the world mostly leaves it, afraid for the little 
house of cards it calls Society, the refuge of the 
Eternal No. 



II. 

The great epics and much of the best lyric work of 
the Middle Ages are anonymous : like the spiring 
Cathedrals of France, the Chanson de Roland, the 
Couronnement de Louis and most of the love songs 
and chansons de toile are the expression of a common 
aspiration. They are the fine flowers of mediaeval 
society. I do not mean that they sprang into full being 
without an actual author. I mean that we do not know 
who wrote them, and that it matters not who did. 
Even the signed work of individuals is a social rather 
than a personal expression. It is of little significance 
that Adenet le Roi wrote the romaunt of Berthe aux 
grands pieds, or that Chretien de Troyes wrote Le 



THE POINT OF VIEW 11 

Chevalier au Lion. If the Middle Ages in love with 
love itself had written the first part of the Romaunt oj 
the Rose it would not have been different. That Guil- 
laume de Lorris held the pen of the lover is of no 
moment. The dawn and evening songs of the Trouba- 
dours, their tensons, sirventes, complaints and descorts 
conform rigorously to a common pattern, both in form 
and spirit. 

The personal note begins with the Renaissance. 
There were no doubt forerunners, dissidents from the 
convention of their time, like Charles d'Orleans and 
Villon; but they were late and the dawn had almost 
begun. For the Sixteenth Century it was sufficient that 
the poet, putting into words his vision of the world, 
and doing his homage to Our Lady Beauty, should ex- 
press himself. The Renaissance was occupied with 
individual values : not with the elaboration of a social 
system. It was a time of break-up, of clash and pas- 
sion and of great personalities. The Delie of Maurice 
Sceve is not the expression of Lyonese society but of 
Sceve himself : Ronsard is Ronsard and no one else. 

With the Seventeenth Century Art becomes again, 
at least in theory, impersonal. Society was all-im- 
portant. Courtly France inspired Corneille, Moliere 
and Racine : they are the blossoming of a social con- 
ception and a social code. The uncompromising 
Alceste would even praise the verses of Oronte if 
the King himself expressly required it. Boileau and La 
Fontaine urged the poet to be natural and true. But 
they meant that he must accept the conventions, for- 
mal and intrinsic, of the Court of Louis XIV. Nature 
and Truth were nothing else. Reason dictated such 
conformity and usage demanded it. The ** libertins," 



12 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

it is true, survivors of the sixteenth century, like Tristan 
l'Hermite, Theophile de Viau, Saint- Amant, or incor- 
rigible individualists like Scarron, or the Abbe de 
Boisrobert, or Savinien de Cyrano-Bergerac went 
their own way and incurred the odium of noncon- 
formity. 

The Eighteenth Century accepted the same doc- 
trine. Art was still social; but society had divided. 
All that counted in France was not gathered round 
the Regent or Pompadour or Du Barry ; the third estate 
was coming to its own. The Court and the Bour- 
geoisie sought divergent expression. Voltaire and the 
minor poets are the product of Versailles; in Diderot 
the middle class found a voice. There was, however, 
in Rousseau a strong protest of the individualist doc- 
trine : and he gained the day. The poets of Romanti- 
cism expressed only themselves. 

III. 

The distinction of social and personal art does not 
carry with it a coincident distinction of didactic Art 
and Art for Art's sake. Social art is not necessarily 
didactic nor personal art necessarily an end in itself. 
Hugo, personal to excess, is a notable example of 
Art trespassing on every field, moral, political, 
religious. The best work of the Middle Ages was not 
didactic. 

The conception of Art as a Teacher arose, no doubt, 
out of the mnemonic use of verse by the mediaeval 
moralists. The Vie de Saint Leger set a bad example 
of merely versified lives of saints and other works of 
edification, broken, it is true, here and there, by a 
really poetic production, such as the wonderfully har- 



THE POINT OF VIEW B 

monious Vie de Saint Alexis with its flashes of over- 
whelming passion, and amid its crudity t touches and 
whole stanzas of perfect artistic mastery. 

An eminent critic in his Hamlet refers to ** the 
popular tendency, which was also a Greek and a 
Renaissance tendency, to regard Art as having a did- 
actic function. . . ." As regards the Renaissance 
in France he is certainly in error. Nowhere is the 
sense of Art in and for itself, as the expression of the 
poet's being in beauty, more pure of all alloy than in 
the work of the first great French poet of the Renais- 
sance. Sceve had no didactic purpose. Pontus de 
Tyard had a visitor one day who, finding him reading 
Sceve's Delie, took up the book and threw it down 
contemptuously after reading a verse or two. To him 
Tyard replied that little would Sceve care whether 
fools understood him or not — ** qu' aussi se souciait 
bien peu le seigneur Maurice que Delie fut vue ni 
maniee des veaux." 

Ronsard, indeed, wrote a series of very noble did«- 
actic poems. But Art never stooped to be the hand- 
maid of religion or politics : it might assume, as a 
sacred duty, the guidance of nations and of kings. 
The Renaissance never lost its nobility of outlook. 
Art could teach, because it stood above all other 
manifestations of the human mind. It had the right 
to dictate, because it knew. Later writers used the 
forms of Art to encompass moral ends because to 
them Art was a mean thing, valuable only in virtue 
of its uses. 

The high conception the Sixteenth Century held of 
didactic art may be expressed in the words of the 
Jesuit Pere Lemoyne, an " attarde " of the Renais- 



14 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

sance, who wrote the best epic poem of the French 
Seventeenth Century. He maintained, m the days of 
Boileau, a lofty view of Art. He protested against the 
low conception of didactic art which the mean spirits 
of the day opposed to the great conception of the Six- 
teenth Century, and declared that the Poet is ** le 
commis du Magistrat eternel, le Cooperateur et 
1' Agent de Dieu . . . le Precepteur des Rois et 
des Conquerants." 

For the Seventeenth Century was pettily didactic, if 
anything that ministered to the grandiose society 
of the Roi Soleil can be called petty. The greater 
genres — epic, tragedy, — aimed at shaping the citizen. 
The lesser — comedy, lyric, pastoral — either at amusing 
him with propriety or at developing his social accom- 
plishments. Individual values were of little import- 
ance compared with social perfection; were, indeed, 
to be strenuously diverted into conformity with the 
social ideal. 

Moliere might seem to be an exception. His 
Dorante in the Critique de VEcole des Femmes declares 
that " la regie de toutes les regies is to please. But 
Moliere, a writer of comedy, does not claim to mould 
society like tragic and epic poets, but only to amuse 
with propriety those who already conform to the con- 
duct and attitude of all decent citizens. To aim at 
pleasing these is in fact accepting the desirability of 
adapting Art to the needs of polite society. He is, if 
not (in Lemoyne's words), a " Parfumeur or a 
4 * Faiseur de Ragouts M at least little more than a 
** Bateleur de Reduits *' and a *' Plaisant de Ruelles.'* 
He would have been ineffably shocked at the bare idea 
that the end of Art could possibly be the expression of 



THE POINT OF VIEW 15 

the poet's personality. He agreed with Boileau in. 
laughing to scorn those " dissidents " and ** libertins " 
who preferred to think for themselves, to write for 
themselves, and to be themselves. 

Racine was a very great poet. He accepted the 
Seventeenth Century ideal outwardly; he may even 
have believed that he accepted it inwardly. But he 
was too great a poet to. act upon it. In his tragedies — 
which are among the very greatest poems ever written 
— he did express himself : his vision of the world and 
his attitude towards God and man and love and death. 
By the very force of his personality he imposed him- 
self even on Boileau. But Boileau and the Seventeenth 
Century with him persisted in misunderstanding him 
and in accepting him and praising him for qualities 
of conformity that he did not possess. They took 
Phkdre as a moral lesson — * * les moindres f autes 
severement punies " — and Athalie as an illustration 
of the Christian doctrine that was the outward and 
accepted foundation of social order in a century which, 
if it was not religious in any real sense and did not 
deeply believe, yet found in the forms of belief and 
worship a necessary corollary to the monarchic con- 
stitution of government. 

Boileau damned Pere Lemoyne in spite of his 
exposition of the Seventeenth Century doctrine of Art 
— damned him, we must suppose, because he stated it 
with such an intensity of conviction and passion that 
the doctrine, on his lips, became rather a personal ex- 
pression than the objective exposition of a universally 
accepted social axiom. Moreover, in spite of Pere 
Lemoyne's theories, his epic Saint Louis and many of 
his lyrics come so near being real poetry that they sin 



16 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

against the Seventeenth Century doctrine of confor- 
mity. In endeavouring to guide and mould the polity 
of the State and the conduct of its citizens, Lemoyne 
expressed himself with so great an individuality of 
artistic utterance as to constitute a sin against the social 
conception of Art. 

The bourgeois school of the Eighteenth Century was 
exclusively and militantly didactic. Diderot and the 
writers of his school were like Monsieur Poirier. He 
could see nothing in a landscape entitled " A Summer 
Evening.*' " Ca ne dit rien ! " is his criticism : and he 
instances as a perfect example of Art, ** une gravure 
qui represente un chien au bord de la mer, aboyant 
devant un chapeau de matelot." Diderot adored the 
sentimentality and moral platitudes of Richardson and 
Lillo. Greuze was his ideal painter : he cared nothing 
for Watteau. Boucher and Fragonard revolted his 
bourgeois soul. He would have wept in contortions of 
4i attendrissement " before Bubbles or Christ and the 
Boy Scout. Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, 
though individualists in Art, were didactic. Paul et 
Virginie is perhaps the supreme example of the posi- 
tively indecent morality of the Eighteenth Century. 
Delille, though not a moral sentimentalist like the 
bourgeois writers, insists on parading his professional 
stock-in-trade in the very midst of his loveliest pas- 
sages. The Versailles School was, however, in general, 
anything but didactic. No one could have less 
desire to preach than Bertin or Cardinal Bernis. 

The Romanticists revived the grandiose heresy of 
Lemoyne. In Hugo the prophet, not to say the 
charlatan, threatened to engulf the poet. If Art is a 
garden of flowers, Hugo's art is too often a monstrous 



THE POINT OF VIEW 17 

floral clock or the Royal monogram in tulips or a loyal 
design in red, white and blue (or shall I rather say in 
orange, white and green, for Hugo was always a 
rebel !). He was not content that his garden should 
delight the senses with shape and colour and per- 
fume : he must insist on planting a moral or political 
" Dogs* Cemetery " of genera and species. He is a 
Professor of Botany, not an inspired gardener like 
Jasmin who ministered to the Pompadour, nor an 
Odilon Redon who painted roses burning like a mid- 
summer noon and larkspurs as blue as the noonday 
sky and as light and airy as celestial butterflies. 

Musset had no didactic aim. His Stances a la 
Malibran — the loveliest music in all French poetry 
— are simply an incomparable Hymn to Beauty. 
Musset had no doctrine. He was just a poet. Gautier 
began the protest against the Romantic conception of 
Art which led to the Parnassian school and the work 
of Heredia and Leconte de Lisle. Since then French 
literary art has kept to the true doctrine : the prota- 
gonists of didacticism have been, happily, entirely 
devoid of any artistic gifts they could debase or per- 
vert to their purpose. No school of any account has 
arisen to dispute the sway of " TArt pour TArt." In 
all the diversity and clash of poetic credos this has re- 
mained the corner-stone of the faith. Decadents, 
symbolists, the jeunes have respected Art : in every 
cafe, in every ivory tower, they have worshipped Our 
Lady Beauty with unfaltering praise and unconquerable 
faith. The other doctrine is left to the Barbarian 
howling without : to the inept, the unclean, the 
masques dancing their obscene carnival around the 
still porticos of Art : to Silenus outside the Garden of 
the Rose. 



II. —MAURICE SCEVE AND THE POETIC 
SCHOOL OF LYONS. 



'mm 



I. 

HE Renaissance stood for life in its fulness 
— the cult of nature, the development of 
the individual and the realization of 
beauty. It was not anti-spiritual. All 
through the manifold web of its activities 
is woven the subtle thread of a new and 
wonderful spiritual intensity — that strange neo- 
Platonism which, with all the rest, coming 
from Italy, mingled with the mediaeval conception 
of *'L' Amour Courtois," and found in France, perhaps 
its chief exponent in Margaret Queen of Navarre, in 
whose Comedie a quatre personnages jouee au Mont de 
Marsan (1547) the Queen of the Love of God proclaims 
the superiority of the neo-Platonic ideal of love over 
Calvinism, Catholicism, and Worldliness. 

After the imprisonment of the Middle Ages the 
Renaissance brought new life to the spirit, a breath 
of wind searching out all nooks and crannies of 
scholasticism, and sweeping them clean with the great 
cleanness of life. It was as if some cataclysm had 
thrown down the unscaleable walls of the prison-house 
and opened a prospect of measureless country beyond. 
Instead of a pleasant valley (as it had seemed) set in 
the encircling hills of authority, men found themselves 
on a mountain-top, with the world stretching at their 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 19 

feet, virgin and splendid for the adventurous traveller. 
Art was the fine flower of this new, more spacious 
life. In the poets of the Renaissance, in the French 
Ronsard, for example — this sense of bigness, this lilt 
of the soul, untrammelled now, toward unsuspected 
glories, is at its full. Their song floats golden and 
illimitable on the wings of their spirit's freedom. They 
are men living life to the utmost, men in all their glory 
of intellect and passion and emotion, no longer in- 
fants swaddled in the bands of Church and State and 
established doctrine ! 

It is true that if much had been gained, something 
too had been lost. Faith save only in themselves had 
gone. The men of the Renaissance were heretics in 
all things. The Middle Ages had placed a veto on all 
thought that transcended the dogma of the Church 
and the accepted theories of statecraft. Unable to 
move beyond a certain narrow range of speculation — 
a speculation in which the conclusion was given as 
well as the premisses, and only the syllogism left 
open, like a journey to one city by many roads — the 
greater minds of the Middle Ages had been forced to 
concentrate. The Art of the " Dark Ages " had in 
depth and intensfty what it had not in breadth. 
Driven inward by the restrictions of Church and State, 
confined to a narrow choice of possible subjects, the 
poet was forced back on new aspects of old passions, 
new attitudes to old conceptions. There is in the 
mediaeval lyric, in the Chansons de toile like 

Vente Tore et li raim crollent : 
Qui s'entraiment soef dorment. . . 
C 



20 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

in the Dawn Songs like 

Gaite de la tor, 

Gardez entor, 
or 

Or ne haz rien tant com le jor, 
Amis, qui me depart de vos. . . 

or in Charles d'Orleans or Froissart, every note of pas- 
sion and of serenity, every mood and experience from 
the copper glories of passion-laden sunsets and the 
hot perfume of still dark meadows on summer nights 
to the fresh wind of spring sweeping over the cowslips 
at dawn; and everything stands out with that strange, 
clear-cut precision as of enamelled fairy meads and 
painted roofs which is so much more mysterious and 
full of suggestion even than mist or twilight or rainy 
woods. Aucassin et Nicolete — is that not Art? Or 
the frail beauty of the Romaunt oj the Rose, 

Ou Tart d' amors est tote enclose 
or the story of Tristram and Iseult. The low sky like 
a starred canopy and the tapestried backgrounds of 
mediaeval life may have been uncongenial to science 
and philosophy, to statecraft in a large sense, to the 
attitude of him who, like Faust, in the Second Part, 
stands before Nature, " ein Mann allein," out of 
accord with the large harmonies and clear 
lines of Greek art, but they were not in- 
consistent with the development of a most 
passionate theory of human relationships, with the 
conception of that " Amour Courtois," which, if it did 
not break the heavy clouds of the sultry sky, filtered 
toto the heart and soul of the Lover a new intensity, 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 21 

like dew upon the fresh grass and buttercups of a 
dawn-lighted meadow, giving him instead of the hard 
finite expanse of the free Pagan world an interior in- 
finity recking nothing of outward and material 
trammels : which stirred the dying embers of the old- 
world fire, if not to the clear flame of 
spirituality, at least to the red smoulder of passion. 
In the shadow of frail poplars on sunset lawns, the 
Middle Age poured its concentrated passion between 
the prison walls of a narrow world, each line a jewel- 
led facet of intense light blazing with love long-pent 
and restrained desire. 

The Renaissance burst the dam. What the 
Renaissance gained in freedom and lilt, it lost in 
concentration. No fixed boundaries subsisting to bar 
the way of the adventurous, nothing remained sacred 
now but Beauty, that dangerous Beauty the 
Middle Ages had so terribly feared, as some 
Siren insidiously calling beyond the prison- 
walls and drawing men away from the com- 
fortable orderliness of uncontro verted dogma. But 
the loss itself is almost a gain. Who can for more 
than a moment regret it? Now all was free, men 
pursued Beauty whithersoever she led, deserting all 
things for her, travelling alone along perilous roads 
or away from roads altogether, following ever that 
strange, new, wonderful fen-light, the Jack o* Lan- 
thorn of Art — our Lady Beauty, at whose feet they 
saw, prostrate in adoration, all forms of being and 
action and Life itself ! And nevermore will this 
search for Beauty, this ripae ulterioris amor cease to 
be a mainspring of life in the Latin countries. The 
night of Maurice Sceve's Delie (1544) is strown with its 



22 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

fire : in him spiritual passion and the love of beauty 
are made one; and it were a bold critic who would 
undertake again to separate the worship of the Queen 
of the Love of God and the Pagan Goddess Beauty in 
the work of anyone who came after him in France. 
There will be times when men think they hold the 
elusive sprite in their nets of rules and canons of 
taste, there will be times when Art becomes a con- 
suming passion and men talk of Art for Art's sake, 
as if Art were not inevitably the flower of life, splen- 
did when life is full, weak and anaemic when life 
totters and sinks beneath the onslaught of authority or 
of the powers of evil. But evermore the mysterious and 
ineffable touch of those supernatural fingers, of that in- 
definable vision, which we call Beauty — which, in the 
eyes of Viele-Griffin became Life itself, Helen of the 
russet hair — will glorify and destroy, coming, alas, 
most to those who seek it least, but all souls being 
tuned to its music and stirred, if they will or not, to 
the quest of the new Graal ! 



II. 

Marot is the faint blush of the dawn : if Art 
be the touchstone of the Renaissance — I mean 
the conscious effort to produce Beauty — then 
Marot is still mediaeval. He shares, however, to 
some extent, the ideas of his patron Margaret Queen 
of Navarre, but he achieves Art, like all the poets of 
the Middle Ages, outside Provence, only by accident. 
He loved sincerely — lie was not capable of passion — 
and he wrote sincere and moving love poems to his 
mistress Anne of Alencon, niece of Francis I. and of 
Margaret. But he had neither the concentration of 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 23 

the Middle Ages nor the new note of spirituality 
which is the emotional counterpart of the artistic effort 
of the Renaissance. He had nothing of the carnal 
passion of the Troubadours nor of that strange new 
Love that came from Italy, half carnal and half mystic, 
incarnated by Petrarch in his Laura. His translations 
of Petrarch have lost the spirit of Petrarch. Here and 
there, perhaps, its shadow has fallen upon him, but 
he has not known it. With Mellin de Saint Gelais, 
he introduced the sonnet into France, but his sonnets 
are empty : the soul of the sonnet is not in them. His 
dominant note is unstudied grace and a mournful de- 
licacy of sentiment — the French word tendresse alone 
expresses it. 

44 And when I look upon my brown-haired mistress 
Young, comely, royal-born of godlike Kings 
Playing the spinet, and her voice and fingers 
Join in sweet harmony. ... * 

The mystery of Art is not there : there is no passion 
nor exaltation. The rival of two Kings in the favours 
of the cruel Diana of Poitiers and the accepted lover 
of a Princess, Marot did not rise to the heights of Sceve 
who loved a courtezan, nor of the two courtezans who 
loved great poets, Pernette du Guillet and Louise 
Labe. 

III. 

The morning star of the French Renaissance 
was Maurice Sceve of Lyons. The amethystine 
wine of sunrise fills his goblet : he has the 
grave purity of the dawn just breaking, not the riotous 



24 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

splendour of sunset. Into the mould of Serafino's 
epigram he poured the Dialoghi d'amore of Leon 
Hebrieu and the Angoisses et remedes d' amour of the 
grand Rhetoriqueur Jean Bouchet, the intimate friend 
of Ronsard's father. He turned the "" Gather ye 
roses " of his Italian model to the praise of love un- 
dying, but he kept the overwrought preciosity of his 
master. And to all he added the intensity of a tor- 
tured and sensitive soul, the keenness of an acute 
analytical mind and a transcending passion for artistic 
form. 

The love he celebrated and in whose flame his 
verse is tempered is not 

" Ce Cupido aisle 
Aveugle, enfant, nud, incertain, volage 
Qui tant d'amer a son doux ha mesle," 

but the great Love of which Rabelais spoke when he 
declared that : 

" Amour ha tel effect 
Qu'il ne peult estre en cceur de folle femme, 
Ains en l'esprit de l'homme plus parfaict." 

Sceve had drunk deep of Margaret of Navarre and of 
Plato, Petrarch and the Italian Platonists. He, like 
Margaret, had wished : 

** Mon ame perir et noier 
Or puisse en ceste douce mer 
D'amour, ou n'y a point d'amer; 
Je ne sens corps, ame ne vie, 
Sinon amour, et n'ay envie 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 25 
De paradis, ni cTenfer craincte, 
Mais que sans fin je sois estraincte 
A mon amy, unye et joincte." 

The illimitable night of his obscurity is strown with 
innumerable stars. Never has a poet knelt with more 
passionate worship at the feet of our Lady Beauty 
nor stretched more longing hands towards her. And 
here and there he has succeeded in putting into words 
of inconceivable fulness and glory the striving of his 
incomparable soul. And where the light blazes 
through the darkness of his failure, not Ronsard him- 
self has attained the immeasurable brightness of his 
verse "which Love tempered in his flame.** Sceve was 
of those who like Petrarch, his master, have had the 
intolerable vision of God and of Love His Minister : 
he saw Love enthroned in the heart of the cornfield 
and in the depths of the wood; sunset and sunrise, the 
daffodils in the spring dew and the dripping leaves of 
the fall told him of Love's rule, divine and eternal, 
in Nature as truly as in Revelation. And Love to 
him went accompanied by joy and sorrow, both 
eternal as Life. 

Sceve was born in 1504 or 1505 in Lyons, the Gate 
of Italy, during the governorship of Caesar Borgia. 
Little is known of his life. Margaret of Navarre 
turned him to the study of Platonism : he had already 
found the reputed tomb of Laura at Avignon. He 
was indeed the first scholar of Lyons when in 1 544 he 
took his place as her most admirable poet by the 
*' profonde eloquence et mirable facture " of his 
Delie object de la plus haute vertu (in the Italian 
sense), a series of 449 dizains in honour of Pernette 



26 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

du Guillet, his mistress, one of the brilliant group 
of Lyonese poetesses, that included Louise Labe, 
Clemence de Bourges and Sceve's own sisters, Claudine 
and Sybille. The high imaginings of Sceve found 
France in travail : her serious mood accorded with his 
"docte gravite "; the easy charm of Marot could not 
fill the aspirations, intellectual and emotional, of the 
men of 1544. Charles V. was at the Gates of Paris : 
Henry VIII. in Picardy : Etienne Dolet, who stands 
for the individualism of the Renaissance, was in 
prison. Sceve achieved a universal reputation. 
Sibilet, writing five years later, speaks of him as a 
classic. Delie took her place beside Beatrice and 
Laura. 

It is not easy to give an idea of the charm of Delie, 
of the passionate relations of the poet to Pernette du 
Guillet, of the difficult perfection of his verse. He is 
stiff and mannered, often obscure, but never careless 
or facile : he, of all poets who ever wrote, respected 
his Art, and sought only to express consummately his 
high desire : ** le haut desir qui nuit et jour m'emeut." 

Pernette du Guillet died in 1545 at the age of 25, 
and in the same year appeared her poems, Rymes de 
gentille et vertueuse (again in the Italian sense) dame 
Pernette du Guillet, Lyonnoise. All she wrote is the 
expression of an intense and unchangeable devotion 
to the poet and scholar who, with his golden words, 
had turned her ** de noire en blanche " and filled the 
night of her ignorance with knowledge and freedom. 
In La Nuict she tells how, in the land of dreams, the 
kingdom of silence, she saw the dark figures of Vain- 
glory, Ambition and Shame. Dawn breaks and 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 27 

drives away " ceste tourbe nuisante." The dawn — 
her " cher jour " — is Maurice Sceve. 

Sceve's Saulsaye, Eglogue de la Vie Solitaire ap- 
peared in 1547. It is the poet's lament for his dead 
mistress, cast in the form of a Pastoral dialogue be- 
tween two Shepherds Antonio and Filermo. Filermo 
is too near his sorrow to seek comfort. He will re- 
main in his rustic solitude ** seigneur des boys grans 
et espais," despite his friend's urging to seek the dis- 
tractions of the town. 

Next year Sceve organised the Pageant with which 
Lyons welcomed Henri II. He was the 

undisputed master of the brilliant Lyonese 
school, grouped round Louise Labe : Pontus 
de Tyard, the translator of Leon Hebrieu's Dialoghi 
and a writer of Platonic dialogue himself : Tyard' s 
cousin, Guillaume des Autels, the critic of the school : 
Olivier de Magny, the most passionate of Louise 
Labe's many lovers : Peletier du Mans, the most curi- 
ous of the many-sided figures of the French Renais- 
sance, mathematician, phonetician, poet and critic : 
Jean de Vauzelles, the friend and publisher of Hol- 
bein : his brother Mathieu, the husband of Claudine 
Sceve, and many more. 

But Sceve 's heart was not in the worldly glory he 
had won. We know that he left Lyons and travelled 
in many countries, returning only to write and publish 
his Microcosme in 1562. After this there is no trace 
of him. The most famous poet of his day utterly dis- 
appears. He took no part in the wars of Religion : he 
is not mentioned as a victim of any of the massacres, 
Huguenot or Catholic, of the next ten years. The 
date of his death is unknown. 



28 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Legend, however, tells that, after Pernette's death 
Sceve tried to live his old life, the life of a great poet 
and scholar, the friend and favourite of Kings, the ad- 
mired of Lyons and of the world. Fair ladies threw 
themselves at his feet and princes vied for his favour. 
But it was all in vain. He wandered the world a prey 
to loneliness and to all the horrors of parting for ever 
from his only possible Beloved. He plumbed the 
deeps of sorrow, learnt the meaning of nevermore. 
One night, when, weary beyond all belief, broken and 
ready to die, he lay down on a mountain side in Syria, 
and the tropic moon lighted his wan face and white 
hair, he slept, not having slept for many days. And 
there came a vision to him, of Pernette in all her 
beauty and full of her old love, Pernette lovelier than 
any Helen, and she bade him for love of her return 
to Lyons, write the great poem they had planned to- 
gether, and then return on a certain night to this 
Syrian desert and await her at the foot of the moun- 
tain. He awoke, and full of new life and wise with 
new wisdom, he returned to Lyons, and wrote the 
Microcosme, the epitome of all his learning and all his 
life's imagining and knowledge. Then leaving Lyons 
for ever behind him, and all earthly hope and earthly 
honour, he returned to the mountain in Syria, and 
there Pernette appeared to him, and they climbed the 
mountain together, his arm about her, her hair stream- 
ing in the night air, the light of her eyes illumining the 
darkness of the Syrian night, for now there was no 
moon. A shepherd guarding his flock of Syrian goats 
on the upper pastures, saw them pass, and told his 
master the following day that a young God had passed 
him leading his divine bride, and that they had 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 29 

walked in brightness on the dark slope of the moun- 
tain, and had then passed on beyond his sight round 
a shoulder of rock, he being stricken with fear and 
not daring to follow. 

And that was the end of Maurice Sceve and Pernette 
du Guillet. No mortal eye saw them again. 

* Through love they did not die/* 

For Sceve was the most passionate Lover of all time. 
To Dante Beatrice was, as Carducci says, hardly 
more than a theological virtue. Petrarch in his old 
age was filled with shame at the error of his youth : 
** del mio vaneggiar vergogna e l'frutto e *1 pentirsi." 
The Lovers of the ancient world and of the Middle Ages 
had not his spirituality. But Sceve's love of Pernette, 
and we know he loved her "not wisely, but too well," 
was transfigured by a wonderful spiritual passion that 
has filled even his most carnal images and sex itself 
with beauty and rapture till his mortal touch of her 
mortal body trembles and burns, in his verse as in life, 
with a more than mortal fire and ecstasy. In him the 
sensuous and the spiritual are so subtly and wonder- 
fully interwoven that the frail beauty of a flower, the 
green and purple backs of a celandine's gold petals, 
are not only a hymn of the spirit to the divine, but a 
love-song to the rich beauty of some splendid mistress : 
the fire of whose lips, the touch of whose hand, 
are not only the fulfilment of desire, but the very 
breath of the spirit burning all dross away. 

IV. 

Sceve celebrated only Pernette du Guillet : she is 
his and his only. He has caught her " fast for ever 
in a tangle of sweet rhymes.* * But Louise Labe, la 



30 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Belle Cordiere, was sung by all the poets of the school 
of Lyons, and was the mistress of more than one. She 
was younger than Pernette du Guillet by some six 
years, and outlived her by twenty-one. Her legend is 
quite other than that of the frail and delicate mistress 
of Maurice Sceve. Hers is a coarser fibre : her verse, 
too, is clearer than Sceve's or Pernette du Guillet's, 
but not so intense or so subtle. She is passionate; but 
hers is the red not the white fire : and the spiritual 
note is almost absent. 

She was an expert in knightly exercises : she is said 
to have fought at the siege of Perpignan when she was 
only sixteen. But she fell before another Lord than 
Death, sought other glory than on the field of battle : 
her golden head was bowed before the Reaper Love, 
and the lance she had borne so proudly was turned 
against her, poisoned with the venom of Desire. It is 
not as 

". . . . Bradamante, ou la haute Marphise 
Soeur de Roger. . . 

that Lyons knew her, but as the faithless wife of ** le 
bon Sire Aymon," the rope maker, and a woman of 
ill-repute (even if some of the tales be untrue). She 
was a " Damnee de 1" Amour.'* Her poems are the 
apologia of her life. Hers is the Canzoniere of pas- 
sion unchecked : the strings and goads of carnal love, 
its unceasing and insatiable desire, the cerements and 
ashes of its ending, these are her matter. Her verse 
rings golden like Peele's or Southwell's : but it swells 
with the moan of intolerable pain. Like Phedre, she 
is the victim of Venus Anadyomene, ** a sa proie 
attachee " ** Je suis le corps, toy la meilleure part," 



I 



SCEVE AND POETIC SCHOOL OF LYONS 31 

she cries to her Lover : she knows it well. But like 
Verlaine or Baudelaire, 

"Baise m 'encore, rebaise moy et baise " 

she asks, and will heed no morrow. The veils are 
torn away : we see her naked agony, burnt by the 
" mile torches ardentes," of her " estrange et forte 
passion.'* She suffers, but does not regret. There is 
in her no whine of insincere penitence. "" Blame me 
not," rather she cries : — 

" Others than us, in spite of their high place, 
Have borne the hardship and distress of love ; 
Their haughty souls, their beauty and descent 
Could not preserve them from the servitude 
Of cruel love : the noblest spirits most 
Have fallen victims, and most suddenly. 
Semiramis, a Queen of great renown, 
Who fought against the Ethiopians 
And with her armies routed their black hosts, 
Found love who harassed her so mightily 
That, conquered, she abandoned arms and rule ! 
And, O my stricken Babylonian Queen, 
Where is your courage, noble in the fray. 
And where the shield, the lance you used so well 
Before whose edge the bravest was undone? 
Where have you put the martial crested helm 
Whose shadow fell upon your head's fair gold? 
Where is the sword, and where the coat of mail 
Wherewith you broke the daring of your foe?" 




III.— PIERRE DE RONSARD. 

I. 

iIERRE DE RONSARD was born at the 
Castle of La Poissonniere, near Coutures, 
on the Loir, in the Vendomois, on 
Saturday, September 2nd, 1525 He 
became in 1536 a page to the 
Dauphin and was present at his death-bed. 
He then passed into the service of the 
Duke of Angouleme, now become Duke of 
Orleans, the third son of Francis I. In 1537 Ronsard 
went to Scotland ^as page to James V.'s young wife, 
Madeleine, daughter of Francis I. He spent two 
years in Scotland, with a break of a month or two, 
and six months in England, finally returning to France 
in 1540. He was then sent with the great humanist, 
Lazare de Ba'if, on a diplomatic mission to Germany 
— to a religious congress at Haguenau. There he 
heard Calvin speak. When he came back to France 
he was ill and became deaf. In 1543 he left the ser- 
vice of Charles of Valois, who had intended him for 
a diplomatic career, but remained at Court as a squire 
of the new Dauphin, afterwards Henri II. In the same 
year, having determined on an ecclesiastical career, 
he was tonsured at Le Mans by Bishop Rene du 
Bellay, the uncle of his famous friend and fellow-poet 
in after years, Joachim du Bellay. His first published 
work, an Horatian ode, Of the Beauties he would 
desire in his Lady-love appeared in 1547. Mean- 
while he had been studying Greek at Paris, and in the 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 33 

same year as his first poem appeared became a 
Master of Arts of the University of Paris. During the 
period of his studies he had conceived the idea of 
grafting the Pindaric Ode as well as the Horatian on 
French literature and, after reading Sceve, had revised 
his conception of poetry. Poetry was for him no longer 
a mechanical art to be learned from a book of rules 
and precepts, but it was Beauty incarnate clothing a 
passionate and intense attitude towards life. 

II. 
Four women divide Ronsard's life and his work : 
Cassandre, Marie, Genevre and Helene. Cassandre 
he saw first when he was nineteen, and she a child of 
fifteen with black hair and dark eyes set in an olive 
face. Four years passed before he met her again, four 
years for the poet of rich endeavour in learning and in 
art, and of somewhat casual courtship of ** la brune 
et la blonde,'* in his native Vendomois and at Paris. 
Meanwhile Cassandre had married Jean de Peigne, 
Lord of Pre, a neighbour of the poet's : and he came 
upon her gathering flowers bareheaded in an autumnal 
meadow. For some time Ronsard saw Cassandre fre- 
quently. In 1 552 she visited him at the Chateau of La 
Poissonniere, where for a time she lay seriously ill. 
The intimacy that ensued seems to have made the 
poet over-bold : for in the same year he was finally 
dismissed by her for too great hardihood in courtship. 
He did not see her for many years and the old relations 
were never taken up again; but for the last fifteen 
years of his life they often met as old friends. She 
survived him twenty years and died in 1605. 
D'Aubigne courted her niece, Diane de Talcy, and 



34 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

her daughter, Cassandre du Pre, married an ancestor 

of Alfred de Musset. 

Ronsard 's love for Cassandre was not platonic. 
That is evident from the sonnets and songs of the 
Cassandre sequence. But it was not carnal. The 
poems addressed to her do not, it is true, throb with 
mystical passion like those of Sceve to Delie. They 
are not, on the other hand, a sultry blaze of red roses, 
fullblown, like Louise Labe's to her lovers. They are 
like pale eglantine, blown lightly by a spring 
breeze beneath a high sky with scudding clouds. But 
Cassandre would have had them like some snow-white 
lily in a convent-garden : candid with passionless 
worship. Ronsard was not bloodless enough to please 
her as a lover : for him the dark roses of her cheeks 
were not only the earthly garment of a soul : they were 
also flushed olive flesh warm with the fire of human 
love : her perfect lips spoke not only wisdom and 
beauty : they were also a chalice wherein he drank 
the body and blood of his beloved. Her touch filled 
him with ineffable fire : the spirit blazed its undeniable 
way burning up the dross of desire : but it was a 
flame and not the cold light of austere and distant 
adoration. He desires like a shower of gold to fall 
drop by drop into her lap as she sleeps : to be a white 
bull carrying her through the April meadows : a Nar- 
cissus and she a pool that he might plunge in its cool- 
ing waters for ever. Cassandre's incomprehension 
drove Ronsard, in the sultry summer of 
his life, into the heedless intoxication of 
Marie's kisses. From the sparkling goblet of a 
rare liqueur he fell to the drunkenness of 
ordinary wine, and lay, rankly and unaspiring, in the 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 35 

comfortable assurance of her plebeian embraces. 
"Silenus of the swine-herds is his name." 

Marie had not the aristocratic beauty of Cassandre. 
She was the daughter of an innkeeper near Bourgueil : 
her cheeks were red — "" aussi vermeille qu'une rose de 
mai," Ronsard says, and she had curly, chestnut- 
brown hair. Her charms were ample, and the poet 
dwells with wearisome complacency upon them. 

When he loved Cassandre he aspired too high, he 
declares to Pontus de Tyard; now his verse, like his 
love, is " desenflee " and ** se dement parlant trop 
bassement." We tire of the perpetual lushness in 
which the poet wallows : we long to get away from 
these heavy meadows to the heights : from Tess of the 
D'Urbervilles to Senhouse with Sanchia in the star- 
strown night of her last coming. And Cassandre be- 
comes a wonderful might-have-been : the shadow of 
her refusal casts long despair upon the work of her 
poet (for her's, in spite of all, he remains) as upon his 
disoriented life. For three years Ronsard remained 
Marie's slave; then the attachment cooled. She had 
never been faithful to him : but in 1 558 a very serious 
rival appeared in the poet's cousin, Charles de 
Pisseleu, Bishop of Condon and Abbot of Bourgueil, 
with whom Ronsard appears to have shared her 
favours until his cousin's death in 1564. Her early 
death in 1573, or thereabouts, was the occasion of a 
very beautiful series of poems. The instancy of his 
passion had long since cooled, Genevre and a shadowy 
Sinope, of whom we know nothing, had come and 
gone, and Helene held the field. Small wonder that 
the poems to Marie dead are entirely platonic : she 
was little more than an idealized memory of a once 
D 



36 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

glad summer. RonsarcTs grief at her loss is the sorrow 
of an old man who realizes his age and the hopeless 
decline of his gallant manhood; she linked him with 
a past of hope and passion, and her death was the 
snapping of a chord in his own soul. 

During the summer-time of his love for Marie, 
Ronsard wrote the noble Hymn to Death, a peean 
of victory to the great Redeemer. His soul, steeped in 
the heavy langour of mortality, sought to burst the 
dull bonds of the flesh that held him a too acquiescent 
prisoner in the shackles of earthly desire. But the 
blazing light of white Anjou is in the rolling periods 
of the hymn : the fiery sap of summer rises irresistibly 
and each line is like a gold or purple grape ripened in 
the mid-days of Bourgueil. In a cup of vermilion 
Ronsard pledges Death the Arch-Beloved : and swoon- 
ing at her feet, he pours his passion before her. He 
asks only to rest in her arms, at peace; all ardour that 
no mortal Bride can still consummated and assuaged 
in this immortal embrace ! 

Here Ronsard has left Petrarch and Pindar and the 
new-discovered Anacreon and spoken his own passion 
in his own way : 

** I will go seek some other sacred well, 
Whence springs an untouched stream that murmurs 

down 
Within fair orchards far from men and noise; 
A well the sun has never known, the birds 
Of Heaven have left unsullied by their beaks, 
And whither never shepherd boys have led 
Their herds of bulls with trampling feet. There 1 
Will drink my fill of this inviolate draught, 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 37 

And then some new song I will sing, a song 
Whose notes will be perhaps so very sweet 
That coming centuries will sing them yet. 
No robber, thieving from the poets old, 
My song shall be my own and mine alone : 
My song shall rise to Heaven by a new way, 
Singing the praise of Death that's still unsung." 

With Genevre Ronsard had reached the hard cynic- 
ism of the roue. He cared nothing for her and very 
little for her favours : he took them casually and then 
they parted. The dreams and aspirations of spring, 
the achievement and careless enjoyment of summer 
were over. She was the love of his wordly autumn. 
Ronsard was the Court Poet and intimate friend of 
Charles IX., who loaded him with pensions and bene- 
fices. He was the most celebrated poet in Europe, 
prior of Saint-Cosmes-lez-Tours and of Croixval 
(where you may see him in Pater's Gaston de 
Latour), Canon of Saint-Martin of Tours, Abbot of 
Bellozane and incumbent of many cures. 

Ronsard met Genevre bathing in the Seine. Next 
day he passed her door and stopped to talk to her. 
She asked him who he was and if he had loved other 
women. He answered : ** I am Ronsard. That is 
enough.** The whole incident and all that followed 
(save only this answer) are pedestrian enough : they 
lived together for a year and then parted most philoso- 
phically, by mutual agreement. 

With his love for Helene de Fonseque Ronsard rose 
again and shook off the drag. But he could not put 
away the insistent sorrow. He loved Helene truly. But 
he loved her hopelessly as an old man loves a young girl : 



38 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

pretending that the bitter reality of an overwhelming 
and despairing love is but the pretty and precious 
trifling of a great poet playing at love-making with a 
child. Grey and racked with illness, he knew that 
he could not hope to inspire passion in this young beauty 
of the Court. Her love for him, genuine as far as it 
went, was partly sincere friendship, and for the rest 
a compound of affectionate pity and overweening pride 
at her magnificent conquest. Ronsard made the best 
of the situation : the Master acted his self-assumed 
part with brave dissimulation and she accepted his 
love as he gave it and not as he meant it, ununder- 
standing of a poet's broken heart. 

Another sorrow, too, had come upon him : Charles 
IX. had died : 

" And they, alive or dead, torture with equal grief 
Whether of vain regret or still more hopeless tears, 
For indistinguishably love and death are one," 

a sonnet ends, referring to the living Helen and the 
dead Charles. 

Soon, old and broken, Ronsard retired to his native 
country and his many priories. Charles' successor, 
Henry King of Poland, had no use for Ronsard : he 
already had his Court poet, the time-server Desportes, 
who had followed him to Warsaw and back. More- 
over, Ronsard felt little sympathy for the worst of all 
the Kings of France. He was no flatterer of 
sovereignty. Finding Henry obdurate to his remon- 
strances, he dared urge the new Chancellor to disobey 
and rule well. ** It is better," he said, " to lose the 
Sovereign's favour than be hissed by the people." Be- 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 39 

fore he died Ronsard learnt bitterly to know that 
nothing could be hoped from the most Catholic 
Majesty of Henry III. and from his favourites and 
flatterers, and the old opponent of the Huguenots 
turned in despair toward the rising Protestantism of 
Henry of Bourbon- Vendome, King of Navarre. 

III. 
Enough attention has not been paid to the most 
notable work of Ronsard *s autumn, the series of poli- 
tical poems inspired by the Wars of Religion. Up till 
1550 the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance 
had worked side by side. Margaret of Navarre and 
the School of Lyons had many points of contact with 
the Reformers. But by 1560, the opposition between 
the ideals of Calvin and those of the Renaissance was 
manifest. Calvin was, as the rebellious angel in M. 
Anatole France's latest novel puts it, a " maniaque 
froidement furieux, heretique bnileur d'heretiques, le 
plus feroce ennemi des Graces.** There could be 
nothing in common between him and Ronsard. Pro- 
testantism was the enemy of the arts — iconoclastic and 
puritanic; and Ronsard's protest against Calvin and 
the new sect is the protest of Art against Puritanism. 
Catholicism stood for all that made life worth living. 
For Catholicism was still the Catholicism of the 
Italian Renaissance, the Catholicism we still find 
to-day in such writers as the French Barbey d'Aurevilly 
and the Spanish Valle Inclan, picturesque, passionate, 
and human. Therefore Ronsard went beyond his 
protector and exemplar, the Chancellor Michel de 
l'Hospital, from whom he borrowed many of his ideas. 
Michel de 1* Hospital was the greatest statesman of 



40 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

his day, devoted above all things to peace and free- 
dom of conscience. He could afford to be just to the 
Huguenots. But Ronsard, though naturally moderate 
and tolerant, detested Calvinist puritanism too 
ardently to maintain the equable temper of de 
I* Hospital. Ronsard was not religious, de T Hospital 
was. Being firmly convinced of the truth of Catholic- 
ism he could respect the sincere convictions of others. 
But Ronsard could not suspect that among the Calvi- 
nists there were really men whose whole being de- 
manded a reasonable faith and whose convictions 
would not allow them to refrain from propaganda, 
even at the price of martyrdom. He did not and could 
not understand Protestantism. He was a Catholic by 
tradition and habit, and for him the claim of the Pro- 
testants was nothing but presumption and satanic 
pride. To go behind the authority of the Church, to 
oppose the recognised faith of his country were sin 
against God and crime against the State. And to 
presumption and sedition the Calvinists added icono- 
ciasm, puritanism, and petty tyranny. The inquisi- 
tional regime of Geneva with its censorship of morals 
and its "" vigilance committees " that made all privacy 
impossible was utterly detestable to him. Asceticism 
and exaggerated austerity he could not tolerate. To 
defend the Catholicism of 1 560, still untouched by the 
Counter-Reform, was to defend his own way of living 
and thinking, his whole attitude towards life, his Art, 
and the Paganism he held so dear. And, when by 
1563 Civil War had already broken out and France 
was plunged, by the act of the Huguenots, into a 
cataclysm of blood and ravage, then the Catholic 
Church and its supporters stood in Ronsard's eyes 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 41 

for peace and order and good government; and the 
Calvinists were rebels and fomenters of discord — a 
plague and curse upon France. The year of the two 
Discourses on the miseries oj this time and of the 
second version of the Elegy to Guillaume des 
Autels was the year of the massacre of Passy, of 
the English seizure of Havre, Rouen and Dieppe, of 
the seige and fall of Rouen, of the Huguenot attempt 
upon Paris, and the Catholic victory of Dreux. 

Ronsard's attitude towards life is well shown in his 
Answer to some ministers and preachers oj Geneva, 
published in the spring of 1563, a reply to a number 
of Protestant libels. After reciting his Credo, that of 
the Catholic Church, he goes on to give an account 
of his way of life : " On waking in the morning, be- 
fore doing anything, I call upon the Eternal, the 
Father of all good, praying Him humbly to give me 
His grace, and that the new day may pass without 
offence to Him . . . then I get up, and when I am 
dressed, I set myself to study. . . . For four or 
five hours I remain at work, composing or read- 
ing. . . . Then weary of too much reading, I 
leave my books and go to Church : when I come back, 
after an hour's pleasant conversation I dine soberly, 
and give thanks to God. The rest of the day I devote 
to amusement.* * 

Then he tells of his amusements — walking, talking 
with a friend, reading or sleeping in a garden or by a 
stream, or playing tennis, wrestling, fencing, or even 
exchanging good stories with a gay companion, for, 
as he says, 



42 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

* Too much austerity does not dwell in me." 
Finally 

' When brown night has set the stars arow, 
Encurtaining with veils the earth and sky, 
Careless I go to bed and raise my eyes 
And mouth and heart toward the vault of Heaven 
And make my prayer,** , . . 

That is his simple mode of life. 

And then he compares the poet's love of beauty 
with the sullen fanaticism of the sectarian. He makes 
no secret of his love of fair women — seeing in it no 
wrong, provided it be decent and moderate, and he 
ends his poem with a picture of France ravaged and 
destroyed by Civil War and expresses his sorrow and 
indignation at all this waste and horror. But he does 
not forget, even in his anger, to do justice to the great 
Protestant family of Coligny — his friends and protec- 
tors, of whom he thinks no evil and to whom he 
attributes no ill desire toward the realm of France. 

His earlier poems before the outbreak of Civil War 
had been singularly moderate. Here is a passage from 
the Discourse to Des Autels of 1560. He is speaking 
of the Huguenots : 

For they do wrong and we too are at fault ; 
Their fault is wishing to destroy our realm 
And forcibly resist our sovereign's will, 
And in presumption of their proud self-will 
For ancient laws to substitute new dreams; 
Their fault is straying from their fathers' road, 
To follow ways of foreign sectaries ; 
Their fault is scattering seditious prints, 
Slanderous and full of insult and contempt . 




PIERRE DE RONSARD 43 

They think they only see, they only live 

Well ordered lives, while we have strayed from God 

To follow doctrine man-made and corrupt.** 

But then he immediately goes on to castigate the 
Catholic Church for its abuses — no Pope has preached 
since Gregory the Great, benefices are given to un- 
educated men, to boys of fifteen, fops, fools, and are 
sold to the highest bidder. He is particularly indig- 
nant at the young prelates who care nothing for their 
poor flock, " whose wool they take and often their 
skin too,** and who live in profusion, idleness and 
debauchery. And he asks : What would Saint Paul 
say to find the Church *' founded of old in humble- 
ness of soul, in all patience and obedience, without 
money, consideration, strength or power, poor, naked, 

an outlaw ** what would he say to find it to-day 

44 rich, well-fed and proud, well-provided with coin, 
revenues and lands, its ministers swollen with worldly 
wealth and its Popes even clothed in splendid vest- 
ments of silk and cloth of gold?** 

And Ronsard replies : 

** He would wish he had never suffered for the 
Church, never been beaten or stoned or banished for 
it.'* He urges the Catholics to reply to the Huguenots 
not with ** cannon and armour ** but by the pen, where- 
by they defend so well their bad cause, and which the 
Catholics as yet use so ill to defend theirs which is 
just and good. Ronsard evidently does not believe 
that an exhibition of force can prove the justice of 
any cause : for him the victories of the spirit can only 
be won by the spirit. 

But when, in spite of de l'Hospital's efforts, seconded 



44 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

by Ronsard, the Civil War had actually broken out, 
the poet changed his tone. He had to choose his side, 
actively now. He even fought for a while with the 
sword as well as the pen. He apostrophizes the 
Protestant de Beze : 

" No longer preach in France a Gospel armed, 
A pistolled Christ, with powder-blackened face, 
And morioned head and bearing in his hand 
A broadsword, dripping with red human blood.** 

He is convinced that the Protestants are responsible 
for the misery and disaster of the Civil War that is 
destroying France. He is filled with a great pity for 
the poor and humble who are paying the price of war 
and with a great indignation against the Huguenot 
disturbers of the peace. But even now he does not 
forget the abuses of the Catholic Church. In the 
Remonstrance to the People oj France he adjures 
the prelates, assembled at the Council of Trent : 

** Root up ambition and excessive wealth, 

Tear from your hearts lascivious youth, and be 
Sober at meals and sober in all you say : 
And seek the welfare of your flocks and not 
Your own.** 

And again : 

44 Put off your greatness, glories, honours all; 
Be clothed in virtue not in garb of silk, 
Be chaste of body, simple in your souls 
And humbly dignified among your flocks, 
Combining gentleness with gravity. 
Have no concern with worldly things, and flee 
The fickle favours of the Court of Kings.** 



PIERRE DE RONSARD 45 

And Ronsard appeals to both sides in the name of 
Cod: 

** For Christ is not a God of quarrel or fight : 
Christ is just charity, concord and love." 

He even goes so far as to confess to the Protestants 
that " Had they remained simple as of old and been 
content only to seek to reform the Church and put an 
end to the abuses of a greedy priesthood, he would 
have followed them, and would not have been the 
least of those who would have listened to them.** 

Ronsard was soon to enter on the winter of his life. 
I shall not dwell on the bitter paeans of victory he 
wrote for the Catholic triumphs in the Third Civil 
War. For a moment, in exasperation, he forgot all 
his serenity and rejoiced in a spirit of exultation over 
the defeat of his enemies — a temporary lapse that we 
can readily forgive him when we remember the ruin 
that they had made of his beloved France and the 
hope he never lost that a crushing Catholic victory 
would put a speedy end to the horror that had engulfed 
his native land. In later years he returned to his old 
moderation and exhorted Henry III. — alas ! in vain — 
to justice and peace, and, in the long war that ended 
only with the accession of Henry IV., his sympathies 
were, not with the League and the Guises, but with 
Henry of Navarre. 

But he did not live to see the victory of Henry IV. 
He died on the 27th December, 1585. He dictated 
two sonnets the day before he died. They are his own 
epitaph. Here is one of them : 



46 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

** I am nothing but bones, I seem a skeleton, flesh- 
less, nerveless, without muscles or heart beat, 
whom the shaft of death has struck without hope of 
remission. Apollo, god of medicine, and his son, 
/Esculapius, both great masters, cannot cure me, 
their skill has failed me; farewell, pleasant sun ! my 
eye is blinded, my heart is about to go down where 
everything is disintegrated. What friend seeing me 
so stripped as this, does not carry back home a sad 
and humid eye, consoling me in my bed and kiss- 
ing my face, and wiping my eyes put to sleep by 
death? Farewell, dear companions, farewell, my 
dear friends ! I am going first to prepare a place 
for you.** 

He did not have his due : the little souls of Malherbe 
and Boileau libelled and besmirched him. Ronsard 
never deigned to be other than himself : he 
could proudly say whether to Genevre or to 
Henry III., "I am Ronsard: that is enough.** 
And he knew that the ladies of his verse, 
Cassandre, Marie, Genevre, Helene, despite their rich 
beauty, their fresh grace and charm of youth, would 
live only in his verse, and that the kings he honoured 
with his friendship were less than he was, and that 
their glory would only be that he had sung of them, 
as of the frail beauties who had loved him, with that 
immortal voice sounding across the centuries from the 
great Renaissance to our own huckster age. 




IV.— THE POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY. 

KNOW a man who has an Eighteenth Cen- 
tury pastel on his wall over the mantel- 
piece of his room. On each side is a 
candlestick bearing a candle which 
he lights at dusk. He calls it his altar 
where forgetting the huckster world about 
him, he makes his offering to the leisurely and graceful 
Spirit of the Old Regime. He has made a copy of 
verses on his pastel, and here it is : 

Pastel. 

" I lit the candles. Right and left they stand 
Of Boucher's pastel, and their golden flames 
Gave life to it. I saw the painted fan 
Rosy with Cupids on its ivory lames 
Swing with the motion of a shapely hand. 
A Cavalier in buckled shoes began 

(Bent low with tricorne pointed to his toes). 
His protestations to a powdered Love. 
He wore a coat of gray and gold brocade 
And silken breeches and a vest of mauve, 
The night-breeze rustled her pannier of rose, 
And swaying hornbeams made their serenade. 



48 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

I saw her close her fan coquettishly, 
And go with feigned reluctance down the grass,. 
Between broad parterres edged with yellow box : 
And marble satyrs laughed to see them pass, 
And many a faun-chased nymph in verdigris 
Glinted between the painted hollyhocks. 

Dim are her patches and her powdered hair, 

And dim the lace and buckles of her friend. 

The flowered gauze upon her silken skirt 

No longer breathes its faint and precious blend 

Of rose and essences arid lavender. 

No lover now shall take the slightest hurt 

From her cold breast or from her ivory cheek, 
The amber witchcraft of her eyes is still, 
The wine of heady kisses spilt : and he 
Who once had bent her to his lover's will, 
Has shed his gold brocade and musked perruque 
In the eternal night of Ninety-Three f * 

That is the spirit of the Eighteenth Century. The 
poets of whom I shall speak, if they did not all shed 
their lives in Ninety-Three, at least all shed their bro- 
cade and powder and lost all that they held dear. If 
they survived, they lived on only as strangers in an ugly 
world, where breeches and wigs were forgotten. With 
the horrid yelp of the Carmagnole around them, they 
dreamed, like my friend, of that bright day when long 
ago they spoke with some powdered Beauty in the 
Gardens of the King, at Versailles or Saint-Germain, 
at Saint-Cloud or Marly-le-Roi. 

The story of the Eighteenth Century is of the gradual 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 49 

decline of the purefy French school before English 
and German innovations. The Revolution and 
Romanticism are in Rousseau's Confessions and his 
Contrat Social. But they are just as much in Diderot's 
plays, and in his dramatic theory. Dancourt and 
Marivaux are French : Diderot and Beaumarchais are 
English. Richardson, Lillo and Edward Moore win 
the battle over the successors of Moliere ; Shakespeare 
beats Racine. Nature ceases to be the appropriate 
setting of well-ordered lives : she becomes a Pro- 
phetess with dishevelled hair and wild eyes, beckon- 
ing to an impossible Paradise. Le Notre 
is dispossessed by Kent. And the whole 
system of Louis XIV. in life and government decays 
and falls before the democratic ideas of England. 

I do not propose to weary you with the cold and 
pompous writers of Odes, J. B. Rousseau, Le Franc 
de Pompignan, Houdar de la Motte, Lebrun and the 
rest. Even the best of them, J. B. Rousseau, is stiff 
and bristles with unnecessary mythology. Pompignan 
had, it is true, a lighter and even playful touch when 
he liked, but that was not often, unless he was dis- 
coursing to some fair lady of Nectar and Ambrosia, 
after some Italian model. Thomas was an honest 
man and dull to extinction. He is the Revolution in 
bad verse. His only, and that a more than dubious 
claim, is that Lamar tine pilfered from him. Le Brun, 
known as Pindar by his admirers and enemies, is even 
duller, inspired no one but Victor Hugo at his worst, 
and was not even an honest man. It is they and their 
likes that have brought the Eighteenth Century into dis- 
credit. Nor do I propose to speak of the writers of the 
earlier part of the century. The Regency and the 



50 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

years that immediately followed it are the decadence 
of the Seventeenth Century rather than the flower of the 
Eighteenth. The epicureans of Vendome wore the full 
wig and plumed hat of the Seventeenth Century, and 
they knew not the deep blue velvet and powdered hair 
of Pompadour nor the diaphanous rose pink of frivolous 
bare-foot du Barry. Else had I fain dwelt lovingly on 
Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, the millionaire 
intendant of the Princes of Vendome, Abbot of 
Aumale, Poitiers, Chenel and Saint-Etienne, spiritual 
and temporal Lord of Saint Georges-en-TIle 
d'Oleron, Voltaire's master and one of the 
most harmonious of French poets and a student 
of the theory of versification. And there are 
some of later days I have not in my heart to praise : 
Fontenelle, whose criticism is so much better than his 
prosaic verse where solemn shepherds make cold love 
to posturing shepherdesses : Piron who spent his last 
years, like Gresset, doing penitence for the work of 
his youth, and who is remembered only for a bad 
comedy, little better than Cresset's masterpiece, and 
without the redeeming pendant of the naughty story 
of Ver-Vert the pious parrot. " For Piron sleeps and 
Gresset is with God M — Piron s'endort, Gresset est 
tout en Dieu, — said Gentil-Bernard towards 1750. 
And there are dozens more : d'Arnauld, Dorat, Colar- 
deau — I will not catalogue them. And of course I 
shall stop at 1789. With the Revolution Rousseau and 
Diderot came to their own, and David, in painting, 
brought the note of austerity proper to Republican 
virtue. With Marie Antoinette the gaiety and easy 
grace of the Eighteenth Century went to its death. Nor 
shall I speak of Voltaire, although the whole Eighteenth 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 51 

Century is in him. Whether at Versailles or from 
Berlin or in his royal state at Ferney he dominates 
everything : his claim is not disputed. I wish rather 
to interest you, if I can, in the minor poets of the 
second half of the century, the Abbe Le Blanc, Cardinal 
Bernis, Gentil-Bernard, Saint-Lambert, the Abbe 
Delille, Leonard, the Chevalier Bertin and Evariste, 
Vicomte de Parny. They are little-known, perhaps, 
in spite of much perfunctory allusion to their insignifi- 
cance, the least known of all French poets. No one 
reads Delille. Bertin, the best of them all, the author 
of one or two of the finest lyrics in French, is not even 
dismissed with contempt by Lanson. He is simply 
not mentioned. Le Blanc is not in the Nouveau 
Larousse, Bernis and Gentil-Bernard sell as Erotica to 
collectors who, if they ever read their first editions, 
will be grievously disappointed. Leonard has advanced 
to a cheap selection by an acknowledged authority : 
but I have editions not mentioned in his bibliography. 
Parny is only known because he was Lamartine's 
master, Saint-Lambert because he was Voltaire's rival 
in love. You can buy Delille for a penny on the quays. 
He was once famous : and he lived beyond the Revolu- 
tion and profited by the cheap stereotypes and the 
sumptuous editions of the Empire. But Bertin is 
rare. He died with the Old Regime. He is best read 
in the two little morocco-bound Cazin volumes of 1785, 
and if you can find those in any penny dip, be gladder 
than if you had found the Lyrical Ballads or the first 
volume of Mr. Yeats. I would not sell mine for a v 
ransom. For I say, advisedly, that if Delille is the 
purest and clearest of French poets since Racine, 
Bertin has softness and music and colour and passion 
E 



>2 ^ FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

more than any before or since. Take the others if 
you will. Leave them to their undeserved oblivion, 
but give me these two, the classical and the exotic, 
for they sound between them the gamut of French 
verse. In Bertin, before Bernardin de Saint Pierre, 
before Chateaubriand, is all the heat of the South : and 
in him it is real : he is quite without pose or affectation, 
and quite without shame or self -consciousness. He is 
not steeped, like them, in the sentimentality and 
sophistries of Rousseau. He is a classic, not a 
Romantic. 

They are all minor, it is true. But God whispers 
His truth to the drunken poet sleeping on the highway, 
as well as to Voltaire on the throne of thought or 
Chateaubriand on the ruins of the world. The great 
have not a monopoly of inspiration. 

Perhaps the minor appeal to us more. They have 
dreamed our dreams and have desired and failed with 
us : their joys are such as we can share : their verse, 
with a little good fortune, we may hope to write. The 
Seventeenth Century is studded with immortal names. 
Even a minor poet, such as Pere Lemoyne, writing 
his Epic of Saint Louis, felt himself the prophet and 
coadjutor of God. Voltaire spoke to God as to an 
equal. But the poets of whom I shall speak walked on 
dewy eves on dusk-enfolded lawns, or hid from mid- 
day under overarching trees, lords of nothing and 
caring to be lords of nothing but some elusive or 
some ready mistress, glad to rest with them in the 
shade of some cut spindle bower or on the soft turf 
of a statue-studded lawn. In the opening or falling of 
a rose they saw birth and doom : in the patches and 
powder of a panniered sweetheart the art of Michel 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 53 
Angelo and Claude Lorrain. The Eighteenth Century 
is not devoid of poetry. The movement in painting of 
Watteau and his successors was bound to have its 
counterpart in verse. While the moralists sought salva- 
tion in sentimentality or in the grave wisdom of anti- 
quity, the poets, heedless of doctrine, lived their own 
lives and sang their own emotions. Like Voltaire, 
they had learned wisdom from Ninon de TEnclos, 
and had left morals to Rousseau howling in his Swiss 
desert and Diderot moved to tears at the spectacle of 
virtue rewarded. They lived and loved and sang and 
asked no more from the golden sunset of the old 
regime. They are not great poets, but they are true 
poets. They loved gardens and fair women and the 
delicate broidery of an artificial life. Their work is 
all in pastel-shades : there is no riot or profusion, but 
there is taste and refinement. Their feeling is no less 
real because it is gentlemanly in conception and ex- 
pression, a touch or a hint sufficing where a Romantic 
would have exhausted the dictionary in violence and 
crudity. To them the world — their world — is a garden, 
carefully laid out by Le Notre, in beds and lawns and 
hornbeam avenues, every flower in its right place,, 
blending colour and perfume exquisitely with the 
brocade and taffeta of comely Lords and Ladies, the 
spring or autumn tints of well-groomed trees and 
hedges, and noonday or sunset enveloping all in its 
appropriate rain of light. They loved Versailles and 
are its expression. Patched and powdered are the 
ladies of their verse : bewigged and musked them- 
selves. Courtly priests, diplomatists and soldiers, they 
are before all gentlemen. They break the Decalogue 
with an easy grace and a laugh : there is no insistence : 



54 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

their touch, even in their sins, is light. Far from them 
is the earnestness in virtue or in wrong-doing of a later 
day or of Rousseau and Diderot in their own. All was 
in the manner : nothing in the thing itself. Their love 
was much as love always is; but they loved without 
remorse or regret or self -analysis. And as they loved 
they lived their lives, of which love formed so great a 
part, without a backward glance or a fear for the 
future, excellently, courageously, like men of taste 
and honour, unshamed before the grandeurs and 
pride and great tradition of Versailles and unabashed 
in their respectful worship of Louis the Well-Beloved 
and Louis the Sixteenth. Outside, Rousseau and 
Diderot might howl and weep and the evening sky 
grow red with the torches of Revolution. But here, 
in Versailles, were peace and gracious gallantry and 
well-ordered repose. 

I like to place them among the box borders and cut 
hedges of Versailles, mingling with the nymphs 
and fauns they understood so well on Le Notre *s 
Parterre des Fleurs, or before the Labyrinth guarded 
by Esop and Love, or strolling through the innumer- 
able Gods and Heroes of the Petit Pare or along the 
Great Avenue of the Cloth of Green — Bertin, in silk 
and gold with sword and plumes, with his Eucharis or 
his Catilie in flowered brocade of pale rose; Leonard 
with his Egle or his Doris tricked out in the expensive 
rusticity of the shepherdesses he sang, with beribboned 
crooks and silken hose and high-heeled red shoes; 
Bernard with the bevy of the many ladies of his 
Epistles, going from one to the other in polygamous 
gallantry : Daphne, Claudine, Olympe, Corinne, Laure 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 55 

and the rest, Delille, in the decent black of his pro- 
fession, alone, with breviary half -opened in his hand. 
I like to think of the courtly Abbe walking towards 
evening in the hornbeam avenues between the formal 
lawns and beds with their fountains and statues and 
terms, and quincunxes of spindle and box, saluting fair 
ladies of the Court, bowing low to the minx du Barry 
or to Marie Antoinette as he dreams along his way in 
the glow of some summer evening. Not for him the 
perfumed cheek of an enshepherded Egle. Bernis, 
his peccadillos forgotten in the purple of his Cardinal- 
ate, may pass them by unheeding, but Delille wist- 
ful of the impossible, sees too well the grace and 
frailty of these lights of love laughing on their gallants* 
arms or disconsolately awaiting their faithless lovers. 
Bertin and Leonard are almost exotic in langour, 
colour and voluptuousness. Delille is severely classical. 
His is the charm of perfect mastery and repose ; theirs 
is the unconscious beauty of a great line thrown at 
random. He has looked and with severe control re- 
fused the proferred joy : theirs is the hotter passion of 
fulfilment. In Bertin the South breathes its enchanted 
desire : Leonard has, alas, read Gessner and Macpher- 
son, and their northern mist clouds many a pagan 
noontide. Delille *s besetting sin is characteristic of 
his cloth. He can write with the purity of Racine, 
but he cannot resist an exhibition of his encylopaedic 
knowledge. He does it decently, of course, not with 
the rankness of a Roucher or the cold science of Saint- 
Lambert. Yet when he should be whole-heartedly 
the mundane and slightly quixotic Confessor of frail 
brocaded ladies, his abominable Professorship will in- 
continently peer out amid the Fragonards and 



56 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Watteaus : he forgets his Art of Love and even his 
Breviary to perorate from his Chair in the College de 
France, 

It is 1 750. The lawns of the Orangerie, against the 
background of Mansard's Tuscan masterpiece, are gay 
among laurels and myrtles, with satin and velvet and 
brocade, beneath the more than life-size white marble 
statue of the Great Louis as a Roman Emperor. There 
is Boucher, in brown velvet, bowing low to Pom- 
padour herself. He is her Court painter and the dis- 
ciple of Watteau, Pater and Lancret. Young Baudouin, 
soon to be his son-in-law, is with him. There 
too, is, the chubby Abbe Bernis, Count of Lyons, the 
Court poet of the King's mistress. He, like no other, 
can pay a delicate compliment, make a dimple on a 
powdered cheek a perfect masterpiece of mannered 
verse, as fragile, as coloured, and as graceful as 
the work of the poets of the Roman decadence, 
Claudian or Rutilian. With him is Gentil-Bernard, 
his friend and Voltaire's, asking only in witty verse 

" To please the fancy of great Pompadour." 

He looks absurdly tall beside the little Abbe, who is 
like nothing so much as a Cupid in a Pompadour 
group, as he fusses along beside Bernard. In all the 
Salons of the time these two are found together, Bernis, 
the writer of madrigals, and Bernard, the famous 
author of an unpublished Art of Love. Everyone 
knows his Epistle to Claudine and his Hymn to a 
Rose, and remembered fragments of his masterpiece 
are on everyone's lips. 

There too is Saint-Lambert, the poet of a few grace- 
ful and highly coloured lyrics, Evening and Morning, 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 57 
and a couple of love poems to his Phyllis. He has 
newly returned to Paris from the death-bed of his 
mistress Madame du Chatelet, once Voltaire's friend. 
He has not read Thomson yet, nor written his Sea- 
sons. That big fat man is the Abbe Le Blanc, his- 
toriographer of the Royal Palaces and preceptor to 
Pompadour's brother. He is a discreet admirer of 
English literature and institutions and has just pub- 
lished his Letters on England. But he is a poet too. 
His Elegies of 1734 are not yet quite forgotten. 

Voltaire, from Berlin, where Frederick knows not 
Pompadour, dominates France. A year or two ago 
he had dominated Versailles, a lord-in- waiting, and 
the old and intimate friend of Pompadour. 

Jean Jacques Rousseau is still unknown save for a 
few verses in the manner of the time, Sylvia s Avenue 
and such like. Diderot is known only as the author 
of an indecent novel. 

It is 1770. Let us stand on the Great Terrace of 
Versailles by the four bronze statues of Silenus, 
Antinous, Apollo, and Bacchus, and watch those who 
pass up and down the grand perron between the vases 
of white marble and the bronze Loves horseback on 
marble Sphinxes. Du Barry reigns in pink and gos- 
samer. That old man is Boucher, once Court Painter, 
now past his prime. Fragonard is with him, but 
Baudouin is dead. Gentil-Bernard is not there, 
though his Art oj Love is still unpublished. He is an 
old man and insane now. Cardinal Bernis is Ambas- 
sador at Rome. You will not see him here. His 
worldly success has been complete, although he is an 
honest man. But instead of him you will see the 
young Chevalier Bertin in the full habillement of a 



58 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

soldier, and his friend the Vicomte de Parny, a soldier 
too, both Creoles, both in the spring of life, one 18, 
the other 17, and convinced of the truth of Bernard's 
line : 

** C'est a vingt ans qu'on a tous les plaisirs." 
They at least, never were seen, nor will be, 
" Pres d'une belle assis nonchalamment." 

There too is Leonard, the young diplomatist, a Creole 
like Bertin and Parny, soon to go on his mission to 
the Prince-Bishop of Liege. He has written his Moral 
Idylls and is famous. He is talking with the most 
illustrious poet of the time, the great Abbe Delille 
himself, the translator of Virgil's Georgics. They are 
discussing Thomson, Goldsmith and Gessner. For 
the literature of England and Germany is penetrating 
France. Young's Night Thoughts have just been 
translated and Ducis' adaptation of Hamlet is but a 
year old. And what is worse, J. J. Rousseau and 
Diderot have made some stir in France., Voltaire's 
royalty is waning at Ferney. Beaumarchais has 
written his Eugenie. The moral canvasses of Greuze, 
from the earlier Paterfamilias and Village Bride, to the 
later Broken Pitcher and Dead Bird, where the 
didactic intention is less obvious, but the suggestion of 
impropriety more blatant, have attracted much atten- 
tion in the Salons from 1 759 to 1 776 and latterly in his 
own private exhibitions. Diderot delighted at the 
pathos of these sermons in oil has lauded Greuze to 
the skies at the expense of the far greater Boucher and 
Fragonard. Diderot does not understand reserve and 
repose : he mistakes the non-moral of the great painters 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 59 
of the French school for the immoral, and is blind to 
the real immorality of Greuze *s professedly moral 
sentimentalities. Greuze has a heavy touch : he in- 
sists. That Boucher never did, and Fragonard's eroti- 
cism is without offence and as light as air. For they 
are French, and Greuze is, like Diderot, a disciple of 
the English school. Saint-Lambert has become an 
Academician, and has adapted Thomson's Seasons. 
He, too, is turning to England. He has lost his light- 
ness and grace. Gone, long since, are the days of 
Madame du Chatelet and the black eyes of Phyllis. 
Delille is talking to Bertin, who has said to him his 
latest poem, Meridian : 

** The sultry noon is still, 
The air is close and warm, 
My Catilie, where will 
You lie and rest to-day? 
The cloudy sky is red 
With lightning, and the storm 
Cannot be far away. 
Where shall we find our bed?** 

To Delille's " young scapegrace ** ! he has retorted 
by a reminder of a little piece of the Abbe's own 
written long ago and almost forgotten : 

*' In some dim garden or dark wood 
Astray before the point of day 
I ask : why is she far away ? 
Upon these velvet lawns we could 
Lie happily : or I could lead 
Her through some dusk-enfolded mead 
Or coppices at dawn bedewed!" 



60 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

It is 1783. The War with England has ended in the 
Peace of Versailles. America is free and France vic- 
torious. The Gardens of Delille and the Loves of 
Bertin are full of the humbling of proud Albion then 
in process : now Louis is Conqueror and the Pax Gal- 
licana is a balm upon the world. But, as of old 
Greece conquered conquered Rome, so now England 
is victor at her victor's feet. The material gain 
is the spiritual loss. 

Voltaire is dead and nemesis has overtaken him, 
for Ducis, the adaptor of Shakespeare, has succeeded 
him at the Academy, and Letourneur has published 
his complete prose translation of the Barbarian. 
Wild nature, sufficiently sophisticated to please Ver- 
sailles, is the mood of the day. Ossian has been 
translated and Gessner. Bernardin de Saint Pierre is 
composing his Studies and Paul and Virginia. We 
had best cross the Park to Trianon. For at Petit 
Trianon, Marie Antoinette, a victim to Rousseau and 
Gessner, spends her days in rustic simplicity, a 
panniered and highsheeled dairymaid. Here are her 
farm-yard and orchard and vegetable garden, and 
her English Park. Quincunxes and cut box and yew 
are no longer the fashion : paths winding among forest 
trees and dewy lawns have taken the place of noble 
avenues, and Le Notre has fallen before Kent. It is 
the day of the Idyll. But thank Heaven, enough 
artificiality has remained in the cult of Nature. We 
need hardly regret the great manner of Pompadour 
nor the mincing frivolity of du Barry. 

Boucher is dead, and Fragonard reigns in his stead : 
Bertin in paint. But the domesticities of the virtuous 
Madame Vigee-Lebrun are more to the Queen's taste. 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 6! 

Bertin has published his Loves, Leonard has returned 
from Liege. Parny has loved and lost Eleonore. 
Delille has long been Professor of Latin in the Col- 
lege of France and an Academician. He has just 
published his Gardens and is the most famous poet in 
the world. To come here he has crossed the clearing 
made by the devastation of 1775 : saplings planted 
English- wise replace the great trees of the great time. 
And a passage of his Gardens runs in his mind : 

* Versailles, alas ! the lost charm of your woods 
The master- work of Louis and the Gods. 
Le Notre's craft is undone cruelly. 
Those trees whose tops rose to the amber sky 
Of sunset, now lie smitten by the axe, 
And their once shady branches strew the tracks. 
They shaded Louis* laurel-circled brow : 
They saw the pride of Montespan laid low : 
There sweet La Valliere to her Royal Lord, 
Lovely and frail, scarce hoping her reward, 
Whispered her timid secret fearfully.*' 

Besides, Roucher, a disciple of Rousseau, has dared 
to forestall his Gardens with a turgid, romantic poem 
of the Months, after Saint-Lambert and Thomson. 
It is true that it is of little account. The Gardens 
are gay and smiling in the sunshine of Delille *s art. 
Roucher*s poem is formless and threatening like a 
cloudy sky over weary uplands and deserted marshes. 
Bertin is still a soldier and a courtier, but he is no 
longer twenty, and his dead Eucharis and faithless 
Catilie have left a note of melancholy in his voluptu- 
ousness. There is a plaintive undercurrent in some 



62 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

of his last poems, written since the Loves were pub- 
lished a year or two ago. 

* The shadows lengthen : hasten : why be wise?" 

he cries to obdurate Catilie. 

M For sweet illusion passes with young days 
And wisdom whispers low 
That I have seen the snows of thirty years/* 

He is reading to Delille a poem addressed to him.. 
Both have in common, at least, a real love of Roman 
antiquity, even if the Abbe tends to Virgil and the 
soldier to Catullus. Delille is about to start for Italy 
and Bertin wishes that he too might see the ruins of 
that Rome 

" Where Titus lived, the Darling of the World " 
** At Tibur, still, they say, on summer eves 
Horace, still rose-crowned, follows Lalage 
Who still escapes him on elusive feet.'* 

Bertin is the last of the gay and care-free crowd : the 
last beautiful trifler of the Old Regime. He, to the 
end, ignored the storm without, the old order chang- 
ing, Rousseau and Diderot howling, and Beauty and 
Comeliness dragged in the mire. 

He saw, but refused to recognise the day when all 
he held dear should be forgotten and 

" Beneath the share the lilies trampled be.** 



POETS OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 63 

For the clouds are gathering. A year ago young 
Andre Chenier came back to Paris from his regiment 
at Strassburg, and is about to start for Italy. '89 is 
approaching, and the sun will go down on Versailles. 

'* The sun has set 
Blood-red behind the trees. O butterflies 
Now are your rouge and patches faded lies 
And dulled your flowered brocade and sarsanet, 
No longer may you greet in dainty guise 
The powdered witty gallants that you met, 
For on each hollow amorous enterprise 
The sun has set. 

No longer may grave abbes quite forget 
Their breviaries — and be only wise 
To read their graceful penitents* sweet eyes. 
On Versailles and on Marie Antoinette 
The sun has set M . . . . 




V.— LECONTE DE LISLE. 

I. 

ECONTE DE LISLE was undoubtedly a 
great master of verse and, within a narrow 
range, a very great poet. His limitations 
are evident. He was not one of those 
whose 



** . . . feet hasten through a fairy field, 
Thither, where underneath the rainbow lurk 
Spirits of youth, and life, and gold, concealed.** 

He missed nine-tenths of the world *s meaning : 
he denied all virtue to the Middle Ages : he saw no 
beauty in a Gothic cathedral; in gray cloisters and 
enclosed gardens; in red roofs among the trees. He 
missed the more delicate and fragile side of things : 
the more intimate and subtle emotions : the eternal in 
the finite : the spirit informing all matter. His Gods 
are Gods of light and harmony : but their light is the 
crudeness of sun on white marble and their harmony 
has no place for the subtle and dangerous and pene- 
trating chords of Debussy or Moussorgsky. His colour 
is gold and purple : without shading. There are no 
pastel effects : no blues and greens fading off into one 
another in the infinite cool variety of Nature. But he 
unflinchingly loved Justice and Freedom and repudi- 
ated with unswerving purpose all those who, in the 



LECONTE DE LISLE 65 

name of God or of the State, have restricted or 
attempted to restrict the free development of the indi- 
vidual : his inalienable right to freedom of conscience, 
thought and speech, and, within the measure made 
possible by human relations, of action. He followed 
and honoured Beauty and hated all those who blas- 
phemed or denied her. 

He refused to bend his knee to any Master high or 
low among the Kings of Earth or the Gods imagined 
in their image. Other Gods had lived, it is true, he 
believed, who had been each in his time, divine, and, 
as Louis Menard said, *'les affirmations successives 
d*un besoin eternel.** He cries not with joy but 
sorrowfully and pitifully: "Te voila done blesse 
comme nous Galileen, te voila serrblable a nous. Ta 
splendeur s'est s'eteinte et les lyres se sont rues,** in 
the words put by James Darmesteter into the mouths 
of the Ancient Gods. And finally he asserted with 
the white heat of passion that Art has no purpose but 
itself, and refused to debase it to the purposes, high 
or low, of any propaganda whatever, whether of Truth 
or of the passing cant of the day. 

II. 

Baudelaire in his article on Leconte de Lisle made 
an unwarrantable assertion and set a bad fashion. The 
former was to the effect that Leconte de Lisle*s work 
did not betray his Creole origin : the latter was the 
fashion of singling out for praise the poet's descriptive 
verse. Leconte de Lisle owed to his birth and early 
life in Reunion not only his predilection for Greece 
and Greek life — ** il aima dans Bourbon une terre 
grecque, la Grece meme ** — his conception of the East 



66 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

and his leaning towards Buddhism, and his love for 
the old Earth Gods and the Golden Age when, in some 
Edenic Bourbon, 



«« % 



a Taurore premiere 
La jeune Eve, sous les divins gerofliers " 

walked in hope and innocence and joy, but — what is 
more fundamental still — the sensuous apperception of 
life which fills all his work : for he was not a profound 
thinker, and the burden of his criticism of his own 
day, of modern civilisation is 

" Nous avons reni6 la volupte divine.*' 

The increasing urgency, moreover, of his longing to 
steep himself in the oblivion of Nirvana, which counter- 
balanced and threatened to eclipse his pantheism and 
his hellenism was only possible to a mystic steeped in 
this sensuous Oriental quietism. 

Leconte de Lisle's merely descriptive poems are not 
his best. The anthologies, British and German, are 
full of them. They may be dismissed : if Leconte de 
Lisle had not been more than a painter of dogs and 
elephants and condors, a Landseer in verse, he would 
have had no mention here. It is true that Leconte de 
Lisle is a master of description : but only when the 
description serves, instead of being, the main concep- 
tion of the poem, as in the perfect Le Manchy which 
no praise can overvalue, one of the most exquisite 
elegies in French, the poet's tribute to the Creole lost- 
love of his youth : or in L'lllusion supreme, his 
nostalgic cry to the land of his birth. 



LECONTE DE LISLE 67 

I might praise his love-poems : for despite his 
restraint and reserve, the passion of Leconte de Lisle 
blazes from time to time in such lyrics as Le Parjutn 
Imperissable and Le Sacrifice, and flashes through 
many other poems like lightning on a dark night over a 
troubled sea. But I prefer the exquisite Greek and 
Latir cameos in the Poemes Antiques and the Eastern 
languor of La Verandah with their appeal of Art for 
and in itself, without the least suggestion of doctrine 
or intention other than such as a potter has in mould- 
ing the contour of a vase for some God to drink from. 
In them his passion for the form and colour and beaut> . 
for the shapeliness and wonder of lovely material 
things glows like the love of a grown man for some 
radiantly lovely girl, like the touch of an artist's fingers 
on velvet or raw-silk, or the smell of a herb-garden on 
a sun-baked midday between enclosing walls. The 
air quivers with undying desire and the bright, young, 
beautiful Gods walk abroad in the eternal sunshine. 
Myriad formed they throng holding ambrosial cups to 
the reader's lips. He drinks the heavy opiate and for- 
gets the clear light of the hills, the eyebright on the 
mountain meadows, and the coldness of a severe land, 
and sinks, willingly, intoxicated, numb, into the 
pantheistic dream of Leconte de Lisle, falling in adora- 
tion before the immanent Gods of his paganism, rest- 
ing, divinely, on rose-leaf couches above an orderly 
and beautiful world. 

HI. 

I do not propose to dwell on Leconte de Lisle' s 
political and social opinions. He had dreamed a 
dream of a well-ordered world in which each man and 

F 



68 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

woman would fulfil an appointed part. His State- 
Socialism does not appeal to me : we know what ex- 
cesses of tyranny the pretext of the common good may 
cover. But in Leconte de Lisle' s time the predominant 
conception of social and economic organization was 
individualistic. Darwin's theories of the struggle for 
existence and the survival of the fittest with, of course, 
an implication that the fittest were the best, were 
eagerly seized and twisted to justify the familiar pro- 
cesses of capitalism. 

But to-day the predominant conception has altered. 
The masses are exploited in the name of a new shibbo- 
leth, the State. The ruling castes have changed their 
pretext : that is all. Individualism has been succeeded 
by " Prussianism." 

Leconte de Lisle, protesting against an individualist 
regime, protested in the name of the Community : a 
Leconte de Lisle of to-day would assuredly protest in 
the name of the Individual against an organized State 
tyranny. He would repudiate the ideal of service, and 
say with Thoreau : " There is nothing so important to 
be done that I would not leave it to hear this locust 
sing." He would declare, with Royce, " Arise then, 
freeman, stand forth in thy world. It is God's world. 
It is also thine ! 

Leconte de Lisle was what the practical man of to- 
day would call a futile idealist, an impracticable 
dreamer, a maker of Utopias. 

We must remember, however, that the ideals, and 
dreams and Utopias of one generation become the 
accepted doctrines and social order of the next, the 
inviolable and imprescriptible truth in the name of 
which new dreamers and idealists and utopists are 



LECONTE DE LISLE 69 

persecuted, tortured and martyred. It is true that they 
have become in the process only empty husks void of 
all beauty and truth, as Christ's dream became the 
faith of Hildebrand, of Innocent the Great, of Alex- 
ander VI. and John XXIII., as the passionate indivi- 
dualism of the French Revolution became the liberty 
to exploit of industrialism, as the dreams of the 
Socialists have become the tyranny of State-Socialism. 
Men like Leconte de Lisle are Rebels against the 
Social order and accepted doctrine of the age in which 
they live : they are the leaven of the world, like the 
religions we profess but do not practice. But if once 
their ideas win and take a firm hold on the world, they 
lose interest in them. They cannot be on the side of 
the majority : for if once an idea has been accepted 
by the majority, it must have been wrested and twisted 
into some sordid and petty travesty, capable of 
universal appreciation. Leconte de Lisle found this 
out in the Revolution of 1848. He cast himself into 
that, young and enthusiastic, fired by high ideals and 
noble dreams. He soon found that the nation, ready 
enough to revolt, was not ready to carry out the ideas 
and dreams in the name of which it revolted. 

** Je te dis que les masses sont stupides *' — he wrote 
to Louis Menard. ** La grossierete de leur sentiments, 
la platitude et la vulgarite de leurs idees " appalled 
him. He would give his life for his ideals : but he 
could not sacrifice his soul. 

When the Third Republic ended in the tyranny 
of Louis-Napoleon, Leconte de Lisle ceased to take 
any part in politics. And he was wise and consistent. 
The part these Rebels play is that, like Qa'in or Niobe, 
of eternal and ever- recurring protest, in the name of 



70 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

humanity and of God, against the self-sufficiency of 
established political, social, moral and economic 
tyrannies. They do not succeed. For spiritual ends 
cannot be won by material means. They fail and 
win by failure. They keep the light of the soul alive : 
their blood keeps red the sunset and the lilies are 
whiter and purer the way they have passed. 

They are the blossoming of the race : dreamers, 
poets, teachers, saints and scholars. They withdraw 
cloistered from a crude age : or go forth carrying 
Beauty and the Idea like a torch, lighting an unwilling 
world and blazing in red splendour on their own 
martyrdom. 

** O sang mysterieux, O splendide bapteme,** 

Leconte de Lisle cried in his Vceu Supreme, 

" Puisse-je, aux cris hideux du vulgaire hebete 
Entrer, ceint de ta pourpre, en mon eternite!" 

Leconte de Lisle, unlike the Romantics, did not 
take his own emotions as the matter of his Art : he 
took Beauty, Legend and the clash of Races and their 
Gods — ** les manieres diverses,** said Baudelaire, 
" suivant lesquelles Thomme a . . . adore Dieu et 
cherche le beau.** Leconte de Lisle regrets ihat Vigny, 
whom he admired as a true poet, had not been able to 
" se penetrer a son gre des sentiments et des passions 
propres aux epoques et aux races disparues.** 
He has no individual heroes unless the monstrous and 
cynical Raven of Le Corbeau can be considered as 
one : but he too is little else than a mocking spectator 
of the history of the world, playing the part of a jeer- 



LECONTE DE LISLE 71 

ing Chorus in the ludicrous tragi-comedy of man's 
madness, an obscene counterpart of the noble Khiron 
in the poem of that name. Helene is the human race, 
struggling in vain against an overmastering destiny : 
Paris and Menelaus symbolize "la lutte de deux civil- 
isations qui se sont dispute Tame du monde," and her 
soul is their meeting place. Hypatie is Greece herself. 
The darkness closes upon her wonderful day. ** Le 
vil Galileen t*a f rappee et maudite." Qain is man- 
kind protesting against " Masters High and Low " : 
like Racine's Athalie, he cries his defiance to " le 
sinistre Iahveh *" : 

** Ecrase-moi, sinon, jamais je ne ploirai." 

In some of his earliest poems the Gods of Olympus 
are identified with the tyranny and oppression under 
which men suffer : Helene, forced into the arms of her 
seducer, denies the deaf and cruel Gods to whom she 
has prayed in vain. In Niobe the Gods of Olympus 
are contrasted with the beneficent Earth Gods :'— 

the Giant Gods, 
Atlas, Hyperion, and him who took 
Clymene for his bride : 

And Niobe predicts a day when they will come to 
their own and 

** Zeus s'evanouira dans la Nuit inconnue." 

Leconte de Lisle deifies Nature : protesting against 
the pseudo-Darwinian conception of Society he pro- 



72 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

tests against the Huxleyan conception of Nature as 
the field of eternal struggle, of Nature 

" red in tooth and claw 
With ravine . . .'* 

of Nature ** careless of the single life/* In Dies Irae 
he exclaims : 

" Salut, oubli du monde et de la multitude ! 
Reprends-nous, 6 Nature, entre tes bras sacres.** 

He soon, however, revised his attitude to the Gods 
of Greece : they are 

" Les divins Amis de la Race choisie 
Les Immortels subtils en qui coulait Tlkhor, 
Heroisme, Beaute, Sagesse et Poesie, 
Autour du grand Kronide assis au Pave d*Or." ' 

He sees in all the Gods that Man has made — " tous 
les Dieux morts, anciens songes de THomme " — 
the deified ideals, fears and passions of humanity; 
and these are the deified ideals of the noblest race that 
ever lived (even if it never lived, as Barres suggests, 
outside his own and Louis Menard*s imagination !). 

In a series of poems Leconte de Lisle has dealt with 
the first comings of Christianity and its clash with 
Greek, Finnish and Celtic ideals. Le Runoia tells 
of the arrival in Finland of ** le Roi des derniers 
temps,** the last-born of the Gods. Christ tells Waina- 
moinen, the High God of the Finns, that his hour is 
come . ' * Ar t thou ready to die , King of the Pole } * * He 
asks. For the brave, strong barbarism of Finland has 
declined : she is ready to accept Christianity together 



LECONTE DE LISLE 73 

with the Russian yoke. He sums up his mission : — 

" I bring to man in terror of his sin 
Contempt for life and beauty and desire." 

11 Through Me," He declares, "man will deny his 
manhood . . . 

The virgin curse her comeliness and grace 

and the wise 

Torn by terrific doubt kneel with bent brows 
In shame," 
" Honteux d'avoir vecu, honteux d'avoir pense." 

The Old God protests, appealing to Nature; but Christ 
retorts — 

" J'ai pris Tame du monde et sa force et sa grace, 
. . . La nature divine est morte sans re tour." 

The minor Gods of the Finnish Pantheon ranged 
round their High God fell into Christ's burning Hell : 
Wai'namoinen himself, the eternal Runoia, set sail in 
silence across the darkness of the Polar Sea into the 
Unknown, hurling a prophetic defiance at Christ : 

" Thou too wilt die ! " 

Here Christ is identified with the Mediaeval Church, 
the object of Leconte de Lisle's most violent and un- 
alterable hatred. But usually " the last of all the 
Gods " is treated with the utmost sympathy. 

The figure "aux cheveux roux, d'ombre et de paix 
voilee " was to him the last of the bright young beauti- 
ful Gods of Greece : born out of his due time : a rebel, 
too, against established tradition and a martyr who 



74 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

died to save the world from the self-complacent 
hypocrisy and the tyranny of Rome's blatant power. 
Even the old battered Raven who appears to Abbot 
Serapion in Le Corbeau, telling of the dead Christ on 
the Cross, is certain that He was more than a man. 

**Celui-la n'etait point uniquement un homme." 

The obscene bird declares that he had never seen any- 
one so beautiful among all the Kings of Earth and the 
Gods : 

" II etait jeune et beau, sa tete aux cheveux roux 

Dormait paisiblement sur l'epaule inclinee, 

Et, d'un mysterieux sourire illuminee, 

Sans regrets, sans orgueil, sans trouble et sans effort, 

Semblait se rejouir dans 1'opprobre et la mort." 

Leconte de Lisle loves the dream of " the young 
Essenian," as he calls him, but he recoils in abhor- 
rence from the mediaeval travesty of this dream. In 
the Mediaeval Church, he thinks, one more God had 
died and been denied. He sees no hope : no new God 
will bring Love and Peace and Justice into this Hell 
of industrialism, into this war-ridden world of hate 

'Where ignorant armies clash by night.*' 

Christ remains our last and now forgotten God. 
In La Paix des Dieux 

" Le blond Nazareen, Christ, le Fils de la Vierge," 

appears as the last of all the Gods, immediately after 
the Gods of Greece. In Le Nazareen, Leconte de Lisle 
apostrophises Him : 



LECONTE DE LISLE 75 

** In ruined Churches Thou can'st hear and see 
High orgy of the impious herd, flower girt 
And wan, run riot, and its laughter mock 
In obscene insult Thy divine distress ! 
Thou sittest now between Thine Ancient Peers 
With russet head against a pure blue sky ; 
And souls like swarms of mystic doves fly up, 
To drink the divine dew at Thy God's lips. 
As in the haughtiest days of Roman Power, 
So in this sinking and rebellious world 
Thou hast not lied while mankind shall endure, 
Weeping in time and in eternity !** 

V. 

In the awful series of mediaeval poems, the Church 
is the Church of the Inquisition, of the stake, of perse- 
cution and torture. It is 

44 la Goule 
Romaine, ce vampire ivre de sang humain,** 

and the pale figure of Christ appears only to reproach 
some dying Pope with his excesses : 
44 Regarde ! mon royaume est plein de tes victimes !** 

I will not dwell on this aspect of Leconte de Lisle' s 
work. He did not understand the Middle Ages : the 
great work of the Church is obscured by the smoke of 
the holocaust, the sky of faith lighted only by the 
44 reflet sanglant des buchers." Les Etats du Diable, 
la Bete Ecarlate, Hieronymus, and the rest are, to me, 
intensely displeasing. Their violence sins against the 
restraint of art : their prejudice is unworthy of a great 
poet. In these centuries of " egorgeurs, de laches et 



76 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

de brutes ** others, no less great than Leconte de Lisle, 
have seen the highest effort and attainment of human- 
ity : the Dark Ages for them have shone with ex- 
ceeding splendour and Saint Thomas Aquinas has 
been a new Aristotle. Leconte de Lisle could see 
nothing of value between the fall of Rome and the 
dawn of the Renaissance. "'" Tout ce qui constitue 
Tart, la morale, et la science etait mort avec le 
Polytheisme. Tout a revecu a sa renaissance. . . 
En meme temps que TAphrodite Anadyomene du 
Correge sort pour la seconde fois de la mer, le senti- 
ment de la dignite humaine, veritable base de la 
morale antique, entre en lutte contre le principe 
hieratique et feodal.** That is the explanation of his 
hatred of the Middle Ages. The joys and splendours 
and beauties and virility of the old doctrines and the 
old life were dead : and the new intensity did not com- 
pensate him for the loss of the wide horizons of the 
pagan world. He could not forgive Christianity for 
having made little of Brother Ass the Body. He 
would have **le souffle de Platon dans le corps 
d* Aphrodite.** He could see no virtue in renunciation : 
could not extract beauty from sorrow and sacrifice. 
Desire not Love was his ideal : and Christ had given 
Love to a sick world, weary of Carnal Beauty and the 
Desire of the Flesh. 

VI. 

Leconte de Lisle regarded his own epoch with 
scarce less disfavour than the Middle Ages. 

" Oh ! que ne suis-je ne dans le saint Archipel 
Aux siecles glorieux. . . ?** 

he asks in his Venus de Milo. 



LECONTE DE LISLE // 

The harmony of Greek life is no more: " Sleep," 
he calls to Hypatia, the victim of Cyril and his horde 
of monks, 

*' Dors ! T impure laideur est la reine du monde, 
Et nous avons perdu le chemin de Paros!" 

All minds are occupied, he declares in his article on 
Beranger, with "la fievre de Futile, les convoitises 
d' argent" and regard the Ideal with contempt or at 
best indifference. " Les imaginations s'eteignent, 
... les supremes pressentiments du Beau se 
dissipent." And in his article on Baudelaire, he 
naively enough, I suppose on the well-known principle 
that the nearest enemy is the worst, singles out France 
for especial abuse as a " nation routiniere et prude, 
ennemie nee de Tart et de la poesie, deiste, 
grivoise et moraliste, fort ignare et vaniteuse au 
supreme degre." 

His poems on modern civilisation are not his best : 
like most of the mediaeval series they sin against his 
own canon of art : they show a hatred and contempt 
too violent to be repressed even in the cause of that 
Art to which he remained faithful like Vigny, 
*" absorbe par la contemplation des choses im- 
perissables, et qui s'est endormi fidele a la religion du 
Beau." 

It may, indeed, be true that 

" L'idole au ventre d'or, le Moloch affame 
S'assied, la pourpre au dos, sur la terre avilie," 

but the form of statement suggests a Socialist tract. 

In the same poem, Anatheme, however are some of 
the loveliest verses in all his works. 



78 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

44 Nous avous renie la passion divine " 

he cries in his despair. 

** Pour quel dieu desormais bruler l'orge et le sel? . 
Sur quel autel detruit verser les vins mystiques?** 

he asks, in words of infinite beauty. 

But he knows no hope. Never more will the slave 
of machinery judge his activities by the standard of 
beauty : the practical man has won and all that makes 
life worth living is lost beyond recall. And so he 
calls upon a new deluge to engulf a futile and an ugly 
world. 

Thus we leave the hollow splendour of Leconte 
de Lisle : he looked at God and Love and Death 
through the smoked glass and pestilential fumes of 
mid-century materialism and agnosticism, and the in- 
credulity and foulness of his hopelessly corrupt and 
selfish epoch blinded him to the hope and glory that 
shone upon his path. He looked backward to a dead 
beauty that he could not bring to life again, and died 
bowed before a memory, when before him, had he 
only eyes to see, Beauty immortal walked the Earth, as 
of old, and the Soul of Man blazed its imprescriptible 
way despite Kings and Priests to the Heaven of the 
" steep and triiid God " he denied. 




VI.— PAUL VERLAINE. 

[HE individuality of Paul Verlaine is that of 
a perverted Pierrot, a *" velvet-footed " 
dancer in the Carnival of Art, whose soul 
was held in thrall, not by the pale incon- 
stant loveliness of the moon, but by the 
baleful and malignant influence of Saturn's dangerous 
beauty. His melancholy is the melancholy of such a 
Pierrot. He knew only too well his utter lack of will, 
knew that he was by nature a feather on the wind, 
blown this way and that by every little breeze of 
desire. He could not to his life's end realise that the 
apparently gorgeous-coloured butterflies of self-in- 
dulgence and sensuality that he chased so gloriously 
and joyously in the day time were in reality only little 
handfuls of grey dust over which he would miserably 
weep during the long sad night. 
In him 

" [-.'imagination inquiete et debile 

Vient rendre nul. . . l'effort de la raison." 

Further on in this same poem, he says of mortals 
having the ill fortune to be born under Saturn 

* Tels les Saturniens doivent souffrir et tels 
Mourir, — en admettant que nous soyons mortels, 
Leur plan de vie etant dessine ligne a ligne 
Par la logique d'une influence maligne." 



60 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Only one thing could have helped him to fight 
against this '* influence maligne," and this was a 
woman's subtle and understanding friendship-love. 
For him Eros of the bandaged eyes held no divinity. 
He needed a lover who possessed the wise peace- 
giving qualities he was to attribute to, and find later 
in his " Mere Marie," and who, at the same time 
would give him the companionship of sympathetic 
intellectual feeling; who was in fact a comrade soul 
understanding and helping the psychological com- 
plexity of his own spirit. In his youth his cousin 
Elisa watched over him lovingly until she died, and 
her memory is one of the most beautiful things in an 
existence in which there were all too few beautiful 
memories of women. She was like a mediaeval saint, 
but had none of a mediaeval saint's rigidity, recognising 
the wayward loveliness and extraordinary genius of 
Verlaine. She paid for the publication of his first 
book of poems. 

At a most critical point in his life, when the lure 
of Bohemia seemed most fascinating to him, and when 
the evil green viper, absinthe, had already begun to 
feed on his soul, he fell in love for the first time and 
married Mathilde Maute de Fleurville, who after a 
few months of romantic illusion about her husband, 
became a second Ophelia to this sorely- temp ted and 
temporarily maddened Hamlet of the Quartier. Like 
the Prince of Denmark he had his Horatio. Lepelletier 
gave him as strong a loyalty and affectionate friend- 
ship as man can give man, and was a square tower 
of sanity always ready to shelter and console. But 
both Hamlet and Verlaine needed more than Horatio. 
A woman like Brutus* Portia might have saved either. 



PAUL VERLAINE 81 

Certainly neither Ophelia of the stupid, gentle fawn- 
like temperament, nor Mathilde with her essentially 
limited bourgeois outlook, could help their lovers in 
the slightest. 

Understanding love, this is what ** le pauvre 
Lelian " wept for and sought after, all through his 
life. It is true that he found much sympathy among 
temperamentally feminine men, but Rimbaud was 
** son mauvais genie," and ultimately played him 
false, and Lucien Letinois died after a few months 
friendship. 

It is this intense need of a love that will not return 
upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ's Virgin 
Mother — the Rosa Mystica in whom he found all the 
qualities he looked for in vain in his cruelly dense 
child- wife and his many *' amies " of later life — and 
crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous blue 
mantle. 

In his wistful penitent moods he loathes sensuality, 
the terrible beast that would clutch and tear his im- 
mortal spirit with its ugly claws and over which he 
has so little control, and woman was never so divine 
to him as when her animal nature was latent and all 
her gentle flower-like qualities in evidence. 
** L'amante," he says, "doit avoir Tabandon 
paisible de la soeur." 

He sought only too often the Infinite in the Finite — 
by bitterly bought experience learning that he could 
find no mortal woman to give him what he desired, 
and only in the Turris Eburnea, shadowed by the 
wonderful blue half-lights of the Catholic faith could 
the poor out-worn pilgrim find rest for his tired and 
dust-stained soul 



82 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Verlaine kneeling before the altar is unfortunately 
all too often succeeded by Verlaine wallowing in the 
lowest depths of debauchery and even crime. He is 
his own " Pierrot gamin.** 

" Creature toujours prete 
A souler chaque appetit."* 

As he grew older the charming gaminerie so de- 
lightful in Pierrot young became a hard and bitter 
cynicism and knowledge of his own utter failure. It 
is the Pierrot of this period who sadly sings the 
Serenade so terrible in its inevitability — the song 
of one who knows so well that satisfied desire will 
eventually kill his soul and yet who cannot save him- 
self even if he will. It is this Pierrot who sighs in 
Spleen : 

** Du houx a la feuille vernie 
Et du luisant buis je suis las 
Et de la campagne infinie 
Et de tout, fors de vous, helas!" 

In his old age he is the Pierrot of Jadis et Naguere, 
a morbid and hollow-eyed caricature of his real self : 

" Now is the moon-struck dreamer vanished quite, 
He who looked down in painted mimicry 
From o'er their stately doors and mockingly 
Laughed at our ancestors. Alas ! that bright 
Flame-dancing mirth like his poor candle's light 
Is dead. To-day we glimpse him shadowy 
And spectre- thin. His mouth gapes mournfully 
As if he wept beneath the worm's cruel rite. 



PAUL VERLAINE 83 

His tunic floats out shroud-like on the cold 
Night- wind, its white sleeves rustling fold on fold 
Like passing birds seem aimlessly to trace 
Vague signs that beckon to the world in vain. . . . 
His sunken eyes* cold phosphorescent pain 
Shines in the deathly pallor of his face.** 

Last and saddest stage of all, nothing to hope for 
now, save the final torture of Death. Yet the "fauve 
planete '* did not entirely conquer its unfortunate 
victim, and although his work might have been greater 
if everything in his life had not conspired so effectively 
to hurry him to the worst of which he was capable, 
he has left behind him some of the finest lyrics in 
the French language, one volume of which at least 
may be placed beside the Odes of Ronsard and the 
best of Alfred de Musset. 

His verse is more akin to music than to poetry. He 
is able with words to express the most subtle and 
scarcely perceptible moods of both external nature 
and his own extremely mobile temperament; moods 
that treated by any of his Parnassian predecessors 
would have been like faded and torn butterflies 
crushed beneath heavy jewelled chains of rhetoric. 
In his hands words became flexible, harmonious, 
plastic, each one of them an Ariel to his Prospero. 
Not for him the pompous eloquence of a Hugo, nor the 
carved and enamelled effects of Gautier and 
Banville, beautiful though they were. He did not 
work in precious stones, but in the most delicate 
shades of colour imaginable, colours that are shadows 
of colours even as a soft grey-blue and silver twilight 



84 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

is the shadow of a radiant spring day of green and 

gold. 

He, too, knew Whistler's secret of impressions 
rather than clear-cut outlines, and in many of his best 
poems, lyrics such as the famous *' La lune blanche 
luit dans les bois " and Romances sans Paroles, 
the words and rhythm combine imperceptibly with 
each other to leave in the reader's soul emotions as 
delicately ephemeral and vaguely elusive as those left 
by the melodies of a Moussorgsky or a Ravel. In this 
" subtle inevitability of skilful pastelizing H lies the 
power of Paul Verlaine. By it he rtot only avoids the 
"impassivity" of the Parnassians, as I have said, 
but also by a certain skill and clearness does not fall 
into the horror of incoherency of his followers the 
symbolists. An eminent critic has likened him to " a 
butterfly tired of the materialism of cosmos, but 
hesitating on the brink of the dull, aimless disorder of 
chaos.* * 

With Verlaine more than with most poets the man 
and his work are inextricably bound up. His poems 
are always ** the instantaneous notation of himself." 
Poemes Saturniens is the most objective of all 
his books as opposed to the intense subjectivity of the 
average beginner's early work, which may or may not 
develop into later objectivity. Although young when 
he wrote this, his first volume, even then he realised 
the extreme importance of form, with which his 
absorption of Emaux et Camees and the work of 
Banville and Baudelaire had much to do, and in these 
poems perfection of metrical structure combines with a 
certain youthfulness and freshness of feeling, not un- 
touched by the essential melancholy trend of his tern- 



PAUL VERLAINE 85 

perament. Woman is still an ideal to him, a goddess 
in whose cool hands lies all wisdom and understand- 
ing. Nature is wonderful and mysterious to Verlaine 
always, but in Pay sages Tristes he draws her in 
her most elusively subtle moods. With what lucidity 
and precision he expresses the most exquisite sensa- 
tions, mystical correspondences and mental affinities ! 
With what marvellous craftsmanship he recaptures 
an autumn twilight in L'heure du Berger ! 

" On the horizon through a mist-wov'n veil 
The moon hangs glowing red : a quivering haze 
Shrouds drowsy meadows; through the sedges 

plays 
A little breeze bearing a frog's thin wail. 

* 4 Now the pale water-lily closed lies, 

And the slim ranks of distant poplars seem 
Arboreal ghosts seen vaguely as in dream, 
And flickering round the bushes flit fire-flies. 

** Now bats awake — circling in noiseless flight 
They beat the darkness with strong leathern wings. 
While Venus, clad in skiey glimmerings, 
Glides forth, the dazzling courier of Night.** 

Every mood of nature is seen through the mood of his 
own temperament. In Promenade Sentiment ale 
it is " de grands nenuphars parmi les roseaux ** 
gleaming palely in the dusk that seem to respond to 
him, symbols of a spiritual hope almost lost beneath 
the enshrouding veils of the night of the soul's 
melancholy; and in Chanson d'Automne the 



86 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

" languorous and long " sobbing of the violins seems 
played on the too sensitive strings of his own person- 
ality. 

Again in the deliciously Watteauesque Nuit de 
Walpurgis Classique the poet asks if these dancing 
wraiths, these " formes diaphanes " of his favourite 
century 

. . . Sont-ce done la pensee 
Du poete ivre, ou son regret, ou son remords 
Ces spectres agites en tourbe cadencee? 

Sont-ce done, ton remords, 6 revasseur qu'invite 
L'horreur, ou ton regret, ou ta pensee? . .** 

In his second book of poems, Fetes Galantes, the 
muse of Verlaine no longer bears the semblance of a 
slim changeling girl, daughter of the dawn and dusk, 
stealthily stealing through autumn woods like a dryad 
listening to the songs of the falling leaves, or like a 
naiad watching the wind ruffling the silver surface of 
some still, twilight- veiled lake; but masked and rouged 
dances softly through the gardens of Versailles, some- 
times pausing behind the high yew hedges to over- 
hear a conversation between Harlequin and 
Columbine, sometimes halting behind a bronze satyr's 
pedestal to see a great lady rustling past, stiff in satin 
and jewelled brocade followed by her little negro page, 
as in Cortege; and often at night when the gardens 
are lit with Chinese lanterns, those " coloured pasquins 
of the moon," sitting amid the dark sapphire shadows 
of some spindle bower weeping at the heart-rending 
sadness behind all the surface gaiety of this gorgeously 
artificial carnival. The inspiration of these poems is, 
as I have said, utterly different from that of Poemes 



PAUL VERLAINE 87 

Saturniens. Mr. Edmond Lepelletier accounts for the 
extraordinary influence of the Eighteenth Century on 
the poet at this time by two contemporary events : 
firstly, the publishing of some literary studies by the 
Goncourts on that century; and secondly, the opening 
of the Galerie La Caze to the public. This collection 
of pictures contained works of Fragonard, Nattier, 
Watteau, and many other artists of their school, and 
it is not unlikely that Verlaine's frequent visits there 
gave him the idea of painting in words and metre 
"les personnages de Boucher, dans les decors de 
Watteau.** 

If in Sagesse Verlaine approaches nearest to 
being a great poet appreciated and acknowledged by 
the many, in Fetes Galantes he is the delicate- 
fingered painter of miniatures in pastels adored by 
the few. In these twenty- two or twenty- three lyrics 
we find the Versailles of Louis XV. in its entirety, 
its delicate butterfly beauty and frivolity, its patched 
and powdered daintiness, its underlying sensuality and 
putrescence, and above all its charm — the charm of 
decaying beauty, of autumn, the season that recurs 
again and again in the verse of Verlaine. 

44 Le soir tombait, un soir equivoque d* automne : 
Les belles, se pendant reveuses a nos bras 
Dirent alors des mots si specieux, tout bas 
Que notre ame depuis ce temps tremble et 
s'etonne." 

Here is all the wistfulness of autumn, the soft minor 
violin note of the poet's subjective vision, his mode of 
projecting his own temperament into a poem that 



88 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

would otherwise entirely recapture the spirit of 
Eighteenth Century lyricism. That perfect little poem, 
Amour par Terre, is impregnated with the same 
vague sadness — a mournfulness that seems to veil so 
lightly the weary soul's desire for the Infinite. In 
Le Faune, too, beneath its apparently " carpe diem " 
subject there is the same restlessness of spirit. 

14 An aged faun maliciously 

Poised terra-cotta o'er the green 
Lawns, laughs as if he can foresee 

Ill-followers of these serene 
Moments that led us trustfully 

(As we had sad-eyed pilgrims been), 
To this hour that elusively 

Whirls to a distant tambourine." 

How different is this to the real paganism of Bertin 
and Parny, who saw beauty and perfect joy in the 
fragile glass of golden wine held in a be-ruffled ivory- 
fingered hand, and death and eternity in the crushing 
of a daisy beneath the red heel of the mistress of the 
moment ! This decadent note of modernity is, how- 
ever, so successfully concealed in some of the poems 
beneath an apparent objectivity that the girl in 
L'allee seems to be a Francois Boucher to the life- 
one of the Pompadour's ladies-in-waiting, doubtless, 
a perfect example of her type, 

" Like a rouged heroine in a pastoral 
Fragile beneath great ribbon knots, she goes 
Along the alley, 'neath the branches' shade 
By old grey, moss-grown seats . . . Affectedly 



PAUL VERLAINE 89 

She gestures in a thousand conscious ways 

As if she played with some pet parakeet. 

Her long brocaded train is blue. Her fan 

(Held lightly in her slender fingers, gemmed 

WkiHieavy jewels) a pastel fantasy 

Of strange vague-shadowed dreams at which she 

smiles. 
A gold-haired child— with delicate nose, and 

mouth 
Crimson and pouting in unconscious scorn . . . 
She is more dainty than the patch that makes 
More bright her sparkling eyes vapidity.** 

And what could be more like a Watteau symphony 
in silver and blue and rose than Mandoline : 

" Here, beneath the sighing leaves, 
Serenaders softly play 
Faded airs to lovely thieves 

Who have stolen their hearts away. 

Here's Aminta and Tircis 

With Clitandre, the evergreen; 
Here's the pleading- voiced Damis 

Teased by many a cruel queen. 

Silken coats that brilliantly 

Flash, long trains of flowered brocades, 
Patched and powdered gaiety, 

Dancing azure-stained shades. 

Whirled in dainty madness these 
Flit 'twixt rose and grey moonbeams, 

Towards them on an errant breeze 
Float the mandolines* faint dreams.** 



90 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

La Bonne Chanson is composed of poems written 
to his wife before marriage. It is a transition from 
objective descriptive plastic verse to personal expres- 
sion, the confessions of the soul; and the substitution 
of one method of art for another, as the result of feel- 
ing, loving and suffering. All his best qualities, 
subtlety, tenderness, harmony and delicacy of form 
unite to make these " occasional verses " a wreath of 
sun-kissed wind-flowers for the brown-gold hair of his 
beloved — a necklace of moonbeam-lit jewels for her 
ivory neck. 

As I have said, Verlaine's work was always the 
victim of the vicissitudes through which its author was 
passing, and when he wrote these poems circum- 
stances combined to bring out the best that was in 
him. He loved and was loved, for as yet no mis- 
understanding had arisen between him and his mis- 
tress. He had given up absinthe, the " atrocious 
green sorceress," whose wiles were eventually to 
wreck his character and turn his childlike naivete 
and tenderness into cynicism and brutality, qualities 
that are only too evident in Jadis et Naguere and 
Parallelement, although both these books contain 
many fine poems. 

Sagesse, his greatest book, and one of the greatest 
books of religious verse in the world, was written 
after his conversion in prison at Mons. 

Verlaine was one of those who entered the King- 
dom of Heaven as a little child, and his mysticism 
has all the charming simplicity and unconsciousness 
of a child's religion. That Christ and the Immaculate 
Virgin are very real personal entities to him is obvious 
to anyone reading the sonnet cycle beginning " Mon 



PAUL VERLAINE 91 

Dieu m*a dit, Mon fils, il faut m' aimer," or that 
beautiful poem, " Je ne veux plus aimer que ma 
Mere Marie." 

This book is full of a serene and quiet beauty which 
is not confined to the obviously religious poems. 
Verlaine had become ruler of the best in his own soul 
during those prison years, and every lyric in 
Sagesse, whatever its subject, is touched with the 
flaming white light of his ecstatic communion with his 
new-found God. 

Poems such as "Le ciel est pardessus le toit " and 
" Un grand sommeil noir," are only rivalled in tender 
musical beauty by the verse of Dowson.* 

Huysmans has said that Verlaine " was truly him- 
self only in hospital and in prison." The four grey 
walls of his cell had protected him and helped him to 
forget the terrible devils that lay in wait for his soul 
as soon as he resumed his old life, and against which 
he seemed quite incapable of fighting, his sword of 
will-power, once bright and sharpened by Love, being 
now dull and blunted and useless. All that remained 
to him was a sorrowful memory of the possibilities 
of his own tormented soul. 

Sagesse was his last great work, although Jadis 
et Naguere contains many sonnets and poems 
of great beauty, elevated philosophy and superb 
workmanship. There are in this book poems written 
in accordance with each of Verlaine's styles, and some 
** A la maniere de plusieurs," obviously much influ- 



* Dowson too believed in Verlaine's credo " De la musique 
avant toute chose " and translated much of his masters work 
with the f ens tiveness that only an artistic temperament of the 
same psychological family as Verlaine's could achieve. 



92 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

enced by Hugo, Leconte de Lisle and others. Included 
in it there is a little play, Les Uns et les Autres p a 
poetic and graceful lover's quarrel, " like an echo of 
De Musset and Moliere, set in a scene by Banville," 
a fete galante adapted for the stage. 

He wrote a great deal in his old age, but most of his 
late work is of no account, being discoloured by a 
dull and mediocre obscenity. His greatest poem, 
Parsifal, which seems to me to epitomise all that **le 
Pauvre Lelian " aspired to be, the star of stars of 
which he never quite lost sight. 

" Parsifal a vaincu les Filles, leur gentil 
Babil, et la luxure amusante — et sa pente 
Vers la Chair de garcon vierge que cela tente 
D' aimer les seins legers, et ce gentil babil; 
II a vaincu la Femme belle, an coeur subtil, 
Etalant ses bras frais et sa gorge excitante; 
II a vaincu l'Enfer et rentre sons la tente 
Avec un lourd trophee a son bras pueril, 

Avec la lance qui perca le Flanc supreme ! 
II a gueri le roi, le voici roi lui-meme, 
Et pretre du tres-saint Tresor essentiel. 
En robe d'or, il adore, gloire et symbole, 
Le vase pur ou resplendit le sang reel 
— Et, 6 ces voix d'enfants chantant dans le 
coupole ! 




VII.— STUART MERRILL. 

I. 

HE early work of Stuart Merrill belongs to 
the Decadence. It is infinitely precious, 
arabesqued and filigreed excessively : 
overwrought with rare ornament : set with 
unwonted jewels. Fete au Pare and Fin de 
Fete in Les Gammes have a wistful tenderness : all 
Versailles dies in them and lives its tragic dream-life 
of dimly-remembered loves. Les Gammes proceed 
from Verlaine's Fetes Galantes and lead to Comte 
Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenzac's Perles Rouges, 
and Henri de Regnier's Cite des Eaux. Only Merrill, 
Montesquiou-Fezenzac and Regnier, after Verlaine, 
have rendered the peculiar charm of Versailles — 
autumn evenings heavy with dangerous memories of 
exquisite follies and sins become attractive in the faint 
aroma they have left. These paeonies bleeding in the 
coppered sunset, these hollyhocks screening the amber 
sky along avenues where once walked the dainty 
carnival of forbidden loves, need a Decadent to catch 
their troubled secret and sip, drop by drop, the perilous 
wine of their rare vintage. In Les Fastes, Merrill, like 
Louis II. of Bavaria, flees 

** Down strange paths lit by an inner moon." 

He rides the insurgent hippogriffs of Moreau's paint- 
ings, and hears the wild gallop of the Valkyries across 
the mad sky of Wagner's music. 



94 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

" Le Centaure au poil rouge et la Licorne blanche " 
clash in heraldic combat in the lists of some faun- 
haunted forest, and strange nightmares brood on the 
troubled sleep of a King dethroned. Les Petits 
Poemes d'Automne are exquisite with the sorrowful 
music of love hopeless and the too red roses of desire, 
past joy and peace that cannot come. 

The poet has plucked from laden trees, holding out 
their too delightful fruit, the pomegranates and 
nectarines of dream and desire. He has drunk the 
aphrodisiac wine : and Love is poisoned. Thought 
and will are plunged in narcotic sleep. 

II. 

The early Merrill is decadent. But that is a state- 
ment of attitude, not a criticism. 

For why should not a man walk on bye-paths if he 
will? God whispers the truth to the dreamer by the 
sedge-girt pools equally with the pioneer marching 
head-high to victory. One man will sail the seas, 
another will row leisurely up some forgotten or undis- 
covered creek. Why should we not cultivate a 
garden, exquisite with fragrant and delicate bloom, 
if we cannot fell trees in some virgin forest? 

There are moments when it is well that a poet, if it 
be not his province to seek out the intensity of life in 
the very places of death and disease, turning darkness 
into light, and casting a glory of beauty over the tur- 
moil of our cities, should look in his own soul and find 
in the dreams born within it some compensation and 
redemption for the corruption of a shallow and a 
hollow world, and averting his eyes from our shame, 



STUART MERRILL 95 

recall us to our destiny and bring us into harmony 
with eternal things. 

One poet will take the obvious world of lust and 
fraud and shame we live in, and shake from its murky 
folds and wrappings of horror and dismay a golden 
rain of truth and beauty, seeing God (as James 
Stephens did) in a charwoman's daughter and 
eternity in a policeman's uplifted hand. But another 
will go with his lady beneath the trembling poplars, 
and in her laughing or her dreaming eyes, her face 
upturned, her white brow and aureole of hair, he will 
catch the colour of the fields of heaven and reflections 
of the infinite beauty unbeheld by any eye; and from 
the grass trodden by her white feet, gleaming in the 
dawn, he will gather the dew of everlasting truth. And 
which is the greater thing to do ? To speak with God 
upon the highway or to surprise His hidden secrets in 
a laugh or a sigh or the rustle of an aspen in the 
night ? 

Decadence is more an attitude than a school : 
Symons, Dowson, and Rachel Annand-Taylor have 
the attitude : but it became almost a school in the 
eighties and nineties in France under the influence 
of Mallarme, ** le poete las que la vie etiole," who 
lost in over-subtleties of emotion and expression, 
achieved nothing but a few disturbing lyrics and a few 
tortured pages of prose distilling a rare and insidious 
poison. Baudelaire was accepted as a forerunner. 
Villiers de l'lsle Adam was hailed as a master : the 
cynical and contemptuous aristocrat who aspired to 
the throne of Greece and wrote Tribulat Bonhomet, the 
Ubu Roi of his time, in which the Gouliards and 
Lanternois of the Eighties were held up to everlasting 



96 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

scorn. The " poetes maudits " were adopted : 
Corbiere, drunken with bizarre beauty, blending the 
obscenities of Montmartre and the forecastle in a 
torrent of clumsy paradox, through which flash the 
lightnings of a tipsy splendour : Rimbaud, Verlaine's 
evil genius, brutal, violent, sensual, in whose few 
poems ** d'une qualite peu commune d'infamie et de 
blaspheme " his unrestrained passions were expressed 
before he found his life-work as a slave-dealer in 
Africa and the East : "* un Stendhal desequilibre, 
mechant et feroce." The minor poets of the Decad- 
ence took all this seriously : and their work is a welter 
of strange passions and strange sins, of "la luxure de 
l'esprit et rintellectualisme de la passion/* 
Verlaine's most famous sonnet 

" Je suis 1' Empire a la fin de la Decadence . . , iS 
which was at most the expression of a mood, was 
made the emblem of a school, and nature became an 
eternal " apres-midi de septembre, chaude et triste, 
epandant sa jaune melancolie sur l'apathie fauve d'un 
paysage languissant de maturite." ** J'aime le mot 
de decadence,'* he was reported to have said, " tout 
miroitant de pourpres et d*ors . . . Le mot suppose 
. . . des pensees ramnees d'extreme civilisation, une 
haute culture litteraire, une ame capable d'intensives 
voluptes. ... II est fait d'un melange d 'esprit 
charnel et de chair triste et de toutes les splendeurs 
violentes du bas-empire. . . . C'est Tart de mourir 
en beaute." 

In Verlaine's soul the world made havoc and music 
and he sang because he must : but the Decadents made 
him the master of a school and the slightest ripple on 
the still lake of his soul was hailed as the expression 



STUART MERRILL 97 

of a credo. The Decadence found its incarnation in 
the exquisite Comte de Montesquiou-Fezenzac, the 
supreme virtuoso of form gone mad, the arch-dissector 
of rare emotions and ** sensations insolites," the in- 
comparable connoisseur of subtle depravity whom 
Huysmans, it is said, took as the model of the hero 
of Au Rebours — the Due des Esseintes. 

The first appeal of the French Decadents when I 
made their acquaintance in Lemerre's four volume 
anthology was in their unreality, their remoteness : 
they drifted in a world of vague dream and vague 
velleity : they offered a narcotic, an escape from the 
hard North, blighting and withering with sleety East- 
wind in June. I read them, at sunset, in the beech 
glades of a hollow lane, while the winds passed 
high over the tree-tops bearing the awful purity 
of snow-topped mountains and the spray of a 
cleansing sea. I fled from the clear air of 
the peaks and the bleakness of the wind- 
swept uplands, and with some passage of Mallarme 
in my memory, alambicated, precious, melting like 
some over-ripe sun-steeped grape on a far-secluded 
vine, I wandered slowly between the copper-lighted 
green of the young satiny leaves and the gold on the 
tall boles of the secular beeches. And to me then, as 
to Mallarme, the mellowness of Saint Martin's summer 
and the dying rays of the setting sun were dear. ** De 
meme la litterature a laquelle mon esprit demande une 
volupte," Mallarme had said, "sera la poesie agoni- 
sante des derniers moments de Rome, tant, cependant, 
qu'elle ne respire aucunement Tapproche rajeunissante 
des Barbares et ne begaie point le latin enfantin des 
premieres proses chretiennes." 



98 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

I read Claudian and Rutilian and the Pervigilium 
Veneris : Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, his Chimeres, 
his Vers Dores, and his 

'* II est un air pour qui je donnerais . . .'* 

Gautier's Albertus : Aloysius Bertrand who, said 
Sainte-Beuve, had ** worn away his youth in chisel- 
ling, out of a rich material, a thousand little cups of 
infinite delicacy** : I even heard Wagner's Lohengrin : 
I copied out pages of Mallarme in the dusty files of 
the National Observer and Henri de Regnier's 
Helene de S parte (the first I had read of him) from the 
Revue des Deux Mondes : Verlaine's Lecture at 
Bernard's Inn from the Savoy and many of his poems 
in a dozen magazines : I read Dowson's Verses and 
Decorations in their first editions : all Pater and all 
De Tabley. Then I went to France and met Merrill, 
now writing his Quatre Saisons, and Viele-Griffin of 
whom I had as yet known little or nothing. I found 
that the Decadence was over and that Poetry, in 
France, had left " les lys languides et les lointaines 
princesses,' ' and that, at Marlotte, Merrill breathed 
the pure air of the forest and drank the wine of sun- 
rise after the strange liquors and miasmic eflluviae 
of the stagnant night. Now no longer, at Mallarme's, 

** Les rheteurs solennels en leur sterilite, 
Tronaient et discutaient la vie imperieuse ! * ' 

As Merrill wrote to me once : ' * The first work of 
the Symbolists consisted in disengaging themselves 
from Naturalism. Their reaction was perhaps exces- 



STUART MERRILL 99 

sive in the direction of a dreamy mysticism, but it 
was necessary, and our return to the essential realities 
of life was the logical conclusion of our first prin- 
ciples. We loved Truth too much not to hate Reality, 
when it seemed opposed to Truth. We retired from 
the world and sought Truth, and some of us think 
that we have found it in Nature, others in the great 
anonymous crowd crying for Justice." 

III. 

Stuart Fitz-Randolph Merrill has a remote associa- 
tion with Dublin. His father, seventy years ago, was 
a student in Trinity College. He was the only 
American there, and had hard work in defending the 
abolitionist cause, " as all those scatterbrained Irish- 
men were for slavery." Like Viele-Grimn's father, 
General Egbert Louis Viele, he fought on the Northern 
side in the Civil War. Stuart Merrill was born in 
Long Island. " Ma patrie, c'est 1'Amerique, et je 
crache dessus ! " he declared at my first meeting with 
him, in 1902, at the house of Henri Mazel. * Yes, 
I spit with something more behind ! " And what was 
behind was his bitter disappointment that the United 
States, a blend of all nations, and thus, apparently, 
designed to escape the curse of chauvinism, had deve- 
loped the disease in a most virulent form. "Ah! if 
I could wring the neck of that damned old spread- 
eagle !" 

*' I am of English, Scots, French and Dutch 

ancestry," he told me. " On my mother's side I am 

descended partly from French Huguenots who settled 

down for a generation in Holland. But I don't attach 

much importance to these matters, and I don't pre- 

H 



ic 



100 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

tend, like most Americans of wealth and fashion, to 

descend from the Conqueror.'* 

After dinner, that evening long ago, we walked 
through the stillness of the Monceau quarter to some 
cafe on the Boulevards, and there Merrill talked to 
me of his friend Oscar Wilde. But it is not with the 
Rive Droite that my memories of Merrill are bound 
up. I saw him most often in his apparietneni among 
the tree- tops of the Qua! Bourbon on the quiet lie 
de Saint Louis. There Verlaine, in bronze, presided : 
and the enamel masterpieces of Armand Point made 
a setting for our talk, while a couple of monstrous 
Persian cats purred pleasant accompaniment. He is, 
to me, however, essentially the poet of the Forest of 
Fontainebleau : not of tourist-haunted. Barbizon, still 
less of Royal Fontainebleau itself, but of Marlotte 
secluded on the wildest edge of the Forest and Mon- 
ti gny straggling with red roofs down to the slow Seine. 
If I think of him in any other setting, the blazing sun- 
light of Provence, her gray olive-groves and the red 
cliffs of her passionate shores and the burnt mountains 
of her background and the blue sea set with white sails 
frame my memories of him. 

I was a tramp in those days : and it was to me, as 
he knew me then, that in 1908, he dedicated his 
longest poem he Vagabond. I remember a meet- 
ing at Cannes. I had come to lunch with him from 
Grenoble, over the snows of Mont-Cenis down the 
awful valleys of Piedmont to Napoleonic Turin : 
pausing in Genoa, hard and cruel in its splendour of 
Renaissance palaces : then along a blaze of blue sea 
and orange groves to the dark gorges of Vintimille 
and a tumble of falling streams, and under bare gray 



STUART MERRILL 101 

mountains and hill-perched white towns set in a mantle 
of gray olives to red Agay and fashionable Cannes. 
A few weeks before my letters to Merrill had come 
from Browning's Asolo : from Venetian valleys roll- 
ing with sunset clouds and pealing with the many- 
voiced Angelus of a hundred villages beneath the red 
glow of the Dolomites in their caps of snow. I had 
awakened to sunrise far over the plain, stretching with 
poplars and cypress, orderly, like the background of 
an early Master, to the blue horizon of the Euganean 
hills : and one day I had walked down the Collino 
Asolano, with the blue Adriatic dotted with white 
sails below me and the mountains of Istria beyond, and 
had come to Venice, silent and frozen on a New Year's 
Day. And a few months later I wrote to him from 
Copenhagen, red and comely on her isles and lakes 
among the green flats of wooded Denmark : from 
Lund sunk in everlasting peace in the cool shadow 
of her Roman Cathedral amid the rolling, untidy 
uplands and ragged cornfields and dark forests of 
Scania. 

My letters, Merrill used to say, sprang on him from 
the ends of Europe, and wherever he happened to be 
(and he too was a tramp), he would get a telegram 
from five hundred miles away to announce one of my 
rare visits. 

We met also, I remember, in Brussels : and in Dover 
I saw him for the last time. I enticed him as far 
as Canterbury, but further he would not go and we 
returned to Dover. The last years of his life he spent 
at Versailles. I never saw him there : some brooding 
sorrow I never fathomed had come over him, and the 
most I could get was a letter occasionally, and then his 



102 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

letters, too, stopped. One of the last was to tell me 
of the visit of Lord and Lady Dunsany whom I had 
sent to him : he had liked them very much. But he 
would not see me again. 

He died, as he had lived, a Poet, and in opinion 
(if the opinions of a Poet matter) a Revolutionary 
Socialist. He had no traffic with place or power : no 
ambitions : and when the Wild Asses of the Devil 
broke loose, he gave no cry of encouragement. Like 
his friend Moreas he might have said : " Je n'ai 
jamais rien fait qui fut indigne d'un poete." But he 
was, unlike Moreas, totally unassuming. He was full 
of generosity and humanity, hating only those who 
degraded the function of the Artist, or dishonoured 
humanity with cant, hypocrisy, greed or violence. 
A letter of his to me, dated December 26th, 1906, may 
serve to give some idea of his attitude : 

" How I feel and understand your desperation 
in industrial Leeds. I felt the same chill in 
brain and heart during my five eternal years 
spent in New York. Humanity is going through 
a nightmare. The old Rhine that I have just visited 
is spoiled by factories, and in fact all Germany 
is saturated with the industrial spirit. Take 
Schweinfurt. ... It was a quiet and quaint 
mediaeval city, with picturesque ramparts. It is now 
surrounded by factories, the ramparts have been 
destroyed, nobody knows why, and the moats filled 
up. It is now a hideous, melancholy and unwhole- 
some city, with a minority filling their money bags and 
a majority stupefied by work and drink and voting like 
sheep for the Socialistic ticket instead of giving what 



STUART MERRILL 103 

is left in their veins of good red blood for the violent 
betterment of their condition. 

* The remedies for ugliness, as for all evil, are to 
be sought in the future, and not in the past. . . . 
Socialism is stupid and conservative nowadays (especi- 
ally in its home, Germany), the different labor parties 
of the world are vulgar and hopelessly near-sighted, 
but I see no salvation in the conservative parties. . . . 

*' I am more and more convinced that what we must 
fight with all our might and power of hatred is the 
religious and patriotic spirit. Of course, our chief aids 
in our work of destruction and renovation will be the 
vulgar, base, stupid mob. But can't you write a sub- 
lime poem on a scrap of filthy paper? Are we not 
ourselves born in blood and uncleanliness ? No, let 
us not be too dainty, and let us keep true to our Ideal 
of more Beauty, more Truth, more Charity in this 
world, even if it seems a sublime lie. 

" I speak rather strongly on the subject, feeling 
often that there is no ground for hope and having 
ninety per cent, of the educated classes against me. 
But my philosophy helps me much . . . every- 
thing changes, nothing lasts nor can be fixed a second. 
And it is in this eternal course and movement of things 
that I find, strange to say, motives for courage and 
hope. Regret, remorse, love of the past are the fore- 
runners of mental decay and death. Let us always 
strive for the mere love of strife. The world is all 
wrong to-day. It will be better to-morrow, and prob- 
ably even worse than now the day after to-morrow. 
But we have eternity before us. . . ." 

At another time he explained his line3 



f 04 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

** Pour avoir voulu, 6 mon ame affolee, 
Monter vers Dieu par 1'arc-en-ciel, 
Tu pleures au fond de la vallee . . .** 

*' I mean . . . that dreams avail nothing, that we 
can only advance step by step, that drudgery, trivial 
cares and little duties are on the way of spiritual 
regeneration." There is no short cut to God. 

Merrill, looking round him at the masses in bondage 
to masters high and low, spiritual and temporal, it 
filled with passionate revolt against Church and State* 
The God of the Rulers obsesses him : and he, like 
Leconte de Lisle, pours out his hatred of this false 
Divinity in poems of overwhelming violence. The 
false so obscured his vision that he could not see the 
true. In the Church, 

" Dont Fombre ne s* eclaire 
Que des trois cierges allumes a Tautel, 
Devant lequel le pretre solitaire 
Murmure la supplique eternelle " 

he cries to his Beloved : '* Oublie les blasphemer 
du pretre!** 

** Ce ne sont pas tes fleurs qu*il faut 
A la feroce idole des pretres, 
Mais le sacrifice de tout ton etre . . . 
Ce n*est certes pas ici qu*habite Dieu.** 

The Mother of God is "la vierge cruelle des 
douleurs,** and where Viele-Grimn heard a hymn of 
love and death and resurrection Merrill heard only the 



STUART MERRILL 105 

** pretre qui marmonne, 
Sous Ses trois cierges, sa litanie monotone." 

And yet the spirit of Les Quatre Saisons is in the best 
sense Christian : the world must be born again, utterly 
renouncing its past of shame and sin : and for this 
end each man and woman must sacrifice all things 
freely without an afterthought. * The whole past 
theory of your life and all conformity to the lives 
around you would have to be abandoned." 

* Let us go on toward to-morrow's dawn," he cries 
in Vers la Ville Inconnue, for only 

'* En cubliant le nom de la ville d'oii nous sommes, 
Nous apprendrous celui de la ville oil nous allons." 

The hero of Merrill's conte La Route dies because 
he turned back. " Malheur a ceux qui partent et s'en 
repentent! . . . Quand on est parti, il ne faut 
jamais regarder en arriere, . . . ni regretter les 
jours qui sent a jamais enfuis."* 

Les Poings a la Porte in Les Quatre Saisons is the 
supreme expression of the faith he shared with 
William Morris. 

It is winter and midnight. " Here the lamp is 
dying with my hope. . . " All things have failed 
him. The cup of dream is empty. He hears a 
knocking at the door. If it be his friends come 
bringing holly to deck his room " dont j'ai banni la 
Folie qui me fut trop belle," he will not open his door 
to the noise of their steps 

"" Car, 6 mon arne, tu es lasse des chants et des danses 
Et du rire des violons parmi les tenebres." 



106 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

If it be a tramp of the Forest come begging a crust of 
stale bread and a jug of sour wine, he will light his 
fire that the outcast may warm himself, and he will 
pour him wine and break him bread. For a " Dieu 
fou " has smitten him. 

But if it be the Son of Man Himself, come in re- 
splendent white with all his train of sick and halt, 
madmen and children, to call him 

" sur la route sans fin 
Vers les villes qu'on ne voit pas encore a l'horizon," 

making in the night " le geste immense du pardon,*' 
then indeed, he will take his stick and go, happy to 
believe at last, 

** Detruire, pour les rebatir, les remparts trop vieux, 
Ou se deferleront demain les etendards de Dieu !"" 

IV. 

In Merrill's later work the sacrifice of the individual 
to the world becomes the sacrifice of the individual to 
himself, and the lines 

44 Only by forgetting the name of the town we have 
left 
Shall we learn the name of the town to which we 
are going " 

acquire a new meaning, no longer of an ideal of ser- 
vice, but of an ideal of self-realisation through sacri- 
fice. 

44 Let us go in spite of all toward to-morrow's 



STUART MERRILL 107 

dziwn," Merrill's great poem The Vagabond is the 
most complete expression of this point of view. 

The poet is enjoying life to the full in his " May- 
garden, amid the tall trees, raising up as an offering 
to spring their branches burning with a thousand 
flames of red and white bloom.*' Suddenly he sees 
tramping along the road, biting off the petals of a 
rose, singing and laughing without cause, a 
Vagabond. The Vagabond speaks first in song and 
then in silence. The meaning of his song is life and 
hope and joy. The meaning of his silence is sacri- 
fice. Not only is there a world to live in to the full : 
giving and taking to the utmost all there is to give 
and take, joy and sorrow, love and pain. This will 
save neither the poet nor his fellows. The fulness 
of life is good, but the fulness of life is not the obvious 
fulness only : it is to be sought also on devious and 
dark ways of oblivion and sacrifice. While 
Viele-Griffin's Helen, her russet hair floating on the 
wind about her, as she appears between the willows, 
may symbolize one side of the ideal fulness of life, 
yet she and all she stands for, joy and passion and 
pain, were but as the sunset seen across her streaming 
hair, part and parcel of a dying day, were not the 
other side of the ideal, the other strand in the web of 
being, represented by that Son of Man who died to 
save the world and make God more completely 
divine, whose wounds are bleeding for ever, and the 
firmament red with His blood. Through the same 
agony as His have passed the martyrs and the saints 
of all confessions, the heroes of all revolutions, the 
lords of life and joy and love. For only beyond 
Gethsemane and the Crown of Thorns, beyond Lethe 



108 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

and the ■■* moonless mere of sighs " lies the fulness of 

body and soul that we seek. 

It is well, indeed, that Nora Murray in her 
passionate need for self-realisation should send Ireland 
to Hell sooner than lose herself, but it is necessary 
also, to take an example from another Irish play, that 
Michael should forget his bride and follow Kathleen, 
the daughter of sorrows. 

First, then, the message of the Vagabond in song : 

** He turned not back to dream over the old way. 
A servant of the future, he was burdened with no 
memories nor remorse . 

** Art thou not," cries the poet, "the far-off child of 
the Wise Men who followed the star and found God ? 
Or art thou not perhaps . . . the unknown 
prophet leading the peoples through the ages . 
toward the promised land of orchards and flowers, 
where one day, after sorrow without end, lovers em- 
braced will sing, giving their lips to one another? O 
vagabond, friend of foxes and hares . . , 
Messiah or criminal, await me ! I have understood 
the meaning of your call ... I have shut my 
door on peace and love without regret . . . 'Tis 
not by sleeping in old dwellings that we learn to build 
upon the new ways . . . O my mouth, bite deep, 
till hunger be appeased, at the fair, forbidden fruits of 
the tree of life ! Destroy, O my fists, by fire and by 
sword, the temples raised to false Gods . 
and thou, my heart, O my heart, be pitiless when the 
people, breaking chains and crosses, shall send all 
priests and soldiers and judges and kings to die on the 
scaffold dripping blood in the dawn ! O vagabond, 
I hear in thy clear loud song the fall of the towers of 



STUART MERRILL 109 

the cities of night . . . and I hear the blare of the 
red trumpets of revolt . . . and I welcome the 
banner of gold of that great day of purification when 
men, leaving blasphemous cities, shall cry loud 
to the eternal vault of heaven the pride of life, now 
free at last from tyrants and from Gods ! * ' And so 
the poet starts out, his soul filled with the fierce 
passion of life, to follow the Vagabond. But he has 
disappeared and his song is heard no more. 

For there is more needed than mere progress to a 
glorious goal. The poet must sacrifice all he holds 
dear without any certain or definite promise, without a 
leader along the unknown, lonely road. 

" O Vagabond, having learned the secret meaning 
of thy Song, I learn now that of thy silence. It is 
that I must seek, alone and without sinking of heart, 
the road thou folio west toward to-morrow's dawn 
. . . I must go alone toward the receding goal, the 
fair country which I shall never know. 

*' I shall go alone whither destiny leads me . 
Old men seated at cottage doors will hurl insults after 
me. Even little children with lovely eyes will follow 
me, spitting and throwing stones at me. And in 
summer, as, with dust-laden eyelids, I pass like one 
demented near the wells by the grass banks beside 
the road I flee upon, no woman will hold out to me the 
pail of cool water wherefrom the labourer drinks as 
he drops his spade and rests from work. Then I shall 
go toward the Town, whither all roads lead . . . 

** O Vagabond, over tombs and nights, raising up 
my dark hands toward the dawn, I follow thee.** 

So for Merrill the procession of life takes the 
semblance of a river flowing past cities and gardens. 



1 10 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

out- worn, once glorious desires, and cast-off splendid 

ideals, toward the Sea of Godhead, and its further 

shore, 

" where quintessential stands 
In over-lordship of all mystic lands 
The burning essence of divinity.** 




VIII.— FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN. 

I. 

*IELE-GRIFFIN does not deny that our de- 
sires are unattainable, or being attained, 
fail to satisfy. His optimism is no 
irresponsible dream of impossible bliss. 
But to him Life is a pilgrimage, and poetry 
is the song of its vicissitudes, of the joy and sorrow of 
the search, of the triumph and despair of the long 
journey — joy, triumph, for the journey is a brave, glad 
journey leading toward God and selfhood, sorrow, 
despair, for the search is a long one and full 
of passionate good-byes — farewells said for ever, 
" words abhorred of comfortable men." It is a song, 
and not a wail, because in all the vicissitudes burns 
the intensity of unconquerable hope, shines the light 
through the darkness from the throne of God. To 
Leconte de Lisle the journey of life was along the 
road to Death, to Viele-Grimn along the road of a 
fuller Being. 

The long procession of the Gods man has created, 
like the pilgrimage of life marked out by cast-off de- 
sires, left Leconte de Lisle horror-stricken and de- 
spairing. Is nothing true? Is there no escape but in 
Nirvana from Maya the eternal illusion? Is there no 
absolute anywhere? And finding none, the poet 
yearned back to his own old desires and to the shed 
beliefs of his race, regretfully, in an eternal looking 



1 12 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

backward, not knowing that each one of us, like the 
race, must live from day to day. What is truth to-day 
will be untrue to-morrow, not because there is no 
truth, but because the realisation of the race as of 
ourselves is progressive towards an unknown goal. 
We cannot sum it up in a complete and final selfhood 
that lasts for ever and is, now and eternally, satisfying. 

The fulfilment of desire is pale after desire itself. 
We must go on to new desires and break new ** glitter- 
ing gates." The joy is in the journey and in the break- 
ing of the gates. And the last gate we break is 
Death. Each time we put behind us our past desire, 
our past gate, and lay down all our former dreams 
and aspirations. That is the only way to live for any 
man. And for the race, it has made and thrown 
aside innumerable theogonies of Gods, and who shall 
say, even if the God of to-day grows pale and 
fills our souls no longer, that He was not true and that 
there is no truth? Who shall tell what countless new 
pantheons shall rise and rule and be adored and fall 
and pass into nothingness and rot on the rubbish heap 
of worn-out Gods, nor what the end shall be, if there 
be an end, when the ultimate God emerges and we, 
with Him, shall have evolved and won to final and 
absolute being through the partial revelations and 
struggles of uncounted myriads of years? 

That is what Viele-Grifiln knows, and what the 
poets of the mid-nineteenth century did not and could 
not know. On the one side we have the stagnation 
of despair, on the other the infinite promise of life. 
And Viele-Griffin has sung the fulness of this in- 
violable hope with a passion and intensity of con- 
viction tEat has never been equalled in all the history 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 113 

of verse. His is, in a sense that transcends even the 
more literal if less essentially real meaning of such 
words in the burning soul of Francis Thompson, a 
hymn of love and death and resurrection, glorious 
with the tremor and light of invincible belief. 

There lies the difference, the essential and unbridge- 
able gulf, between the poets of yesterday and those of 
to-day. A spiritual renaissance separates them. 
Leconte de Lisle sorrowed and denied. Griffin and 
Merrill believe and rejoice in the midst of sorrow, 
knowing its meaning. 

And if Viele-Grimn sings above all of the joy of 
life, of the ecstasy of the ultimate revelation, and 
Merrill sings rather of the sacrifices on the way, of 
the inevitable and irrevocable good-byes, both have 
conceived of life as a pilgrimage towards a goal, and 
have read its meaning in terms of an ultimate end. 

II. 

At a moment, perhaps the lowest that modern 
thought has seen, when, in MockeFs words, " la 
douleur semblait plus artistisque que la joie, la purete 
n'offrait guere d'interet," when "le vice, la maladie, 
la souff ranee et la mort " alone were beautiful, when 
the supreme effort of art was to paint moral and 
physical perversion by the pen of a Rodenbach or a 
Huysmans, a new wave of natural feeling swept 
through poetry, cleansed all forms of art, and, without 
denying either vice, disease, suffering or death — for 
these too have their place — turned the artist once 
more to the glory of life. 

It was time. Science, once justified, like Art, in its 
search for truth alone, in its wish to see things as they 



1 14 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

are, had begun to forget that the ultimate end of such 
a Science for Science's sake, as of Art for Art's sake, 
could only be a clearer vision and an intenser sense 
of life itself in its manifold aspects. The means had 
become an end, the Holy Graal of life had been for- 
gotten. The man of science, become, in Renan's 
words, a mere looker-on at the universe *' savait que le 
monde ne lui appartenait que comme sujet d'etude." 
His imagination and his sympathy by which alone he 
could hope to transform jacts into truth and see 
through the veil to the reality behind, had been 
allowed to die out as something unworthy. In Art, 
similarly, all idea of ultimate value in terms of life 
had been forgotten. The doctrine of Art for Art's 
sake had had its justification in that it could save 
Beauty, and through Beauty, Truth, from the ill-con- 
sidered onslaughts of preacher and partisan, who, 
with no sight beyond the crude unrealities of Sect 
or Party, of Factory or Barrack, had sought to prosti- 
tute Art to the propagation, not of a personal vision 
of Truth, but of prejudices garnered on the rubbish- 
heap of mouldering cants and creeds. But very 
different from this refusal to serve Fact is the refusal 
to serve Truth itself, the assertion that Beauty has its 
roots in dream or form and not in the ebb and flow 
of life from which it rises to return again, in passion 
and fire, in joy and pain and shame and love. 

Now that truth, no longer the precious vision to 
be preserved from the false believers and charlatans 
of didacticism, of sectarian and secular dogma, of poli- 
tical cant and rant, was classed but as another, if 
somewhat lesser heresy, to be avoided, like the others, 
by the true artist, now that the Holy Name was 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 115 

blasphemed, it was time, indeed, for Laforgue, that 
obscure herald of the spring, to arise, crying, almost 
in spite of himself, like some Saint John the Baptist 
in the wilderness of the Decadence : " Faites de la vie 
telle quelle et laissez le reste, vous etes sur de ne pas 
vous tromper!" It was time that a new generation 
should kiss life with burning lips and feel at last the 
unsuspected power of the insistent Force at the core of 
things, of the God who will not be denied, the life- 
giver with whom we are bound up for ever, drawing 
ever nearer to Him. 

III. 

Francis Viele-Grimn's was the first great voice to be 
raised, on the side of life and joy, against the 
** decadence " that had taken possession of French 
poetry. It must have come as a note of something 
almost Messianic to hear his song of hope : 

44 II n'est pas de nuit sous les astres 
Et toute Tombre est en toi," 

his call to faith — not the faith that denies this life in 
its mystery and wonder and glory, but the truer faith 
that exalts it : 

** Croyez, sachez, criez a pleine voix, 
Que T Amour est vainqueur et que l'Espoir est roi !'* 

The poet of Yeldis, Helen, Welland, and Phocas is 
no silly optimist of the jingle plus clap-trap order. 
His is a serious and noble voice speaking to a sick 
world of a life that is full and splendid, and a joy that 

I 



1 16 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

is hard and severe, but greater than all things else. 

La Chevauchee d'Yeldis is one of Viele-Griffin's 
finest poems. Yeldis, daughter of a mysterious gray- 
beard, was loved by five young men, Philarch, rich 
and of noble birth, learned in all wisdom, Luke, 
foppish and self-contained, a drunkard, his brother 
Martial, Claude, pale-faced and smiling, loving 
Yeldis like a wondering child, and another who tells 
the story. 

One evening, after her father's death, at sunset, 
Yeldis set out. The five lovers followed her, across 
the plains, through strange cities, over rivers and 
mountains. 

Philarch and Luke lost courage one day, turned 
their horses* heads and wearily went back. Yeldis 
smiled and spurred on the faster. Claude, at one of 
their halts, sat down to play the Bute and sing. He 
went to sleep and woke no more. Yeldis and her 
two remaining lovers started again over the boundless 
plain. One day as they were drinking at a spring, 
Martial, who knew his mind and dared all things, 
spoke, saying : 

** On my soul I love you, 

And I will die, if it be your will, 
But tell me whither we go.** 

Yeldis turned and smiled, then, mockingly pointed 
onwards. 

" Martial went up to her and took her hand, 
Like a man and frankly. 
She bowed her head like a child. 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 117 

And suddenly, in the full beauty of his youth 

And will and love, 

Unhesitatingly, 

Calmly, silently, without a cry, 

He took her in his arms.** 

And they rode off together. 

Martial won Yeldis, for he alone knew how to give 
himself utterly to her, throwing down all hopes and 
dreams before her. 

The disappointed lover who was left, faithful and 
gentle, had lost her. But from having followed her — 
Yeldis, incarnate Desire, the living Ideal — he had won 
and kept ever fresh in his soul the joyous emotion and 
intensity of life and knew that 

** La Vie est belle de bel Espoir!" 

This poem belongs to 1893. The series of poems 
entitled Au Tombeau d'Helene (1891) gives another 
rendering of the same conception. The poet is seek- 
ing Helen. The road is long that leads to her. He 
regrets 

"The sorrow and the blasphemy and lie 
Of making ever for a receding goal.*' 

He yearns to see this Helen of the matchless eyes, 
towards whom runs, long and straight, over the plain, 
the great road leading through the dusk. With death- 
less hope and invincible faith in his heart he goes on 
his lonely journey. 

At last Helen draws near. The poet knows that all 



118 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

things but one are vain — vain love, vain the ineffable 
love of our springtime, vain the kiss we dream divine, 
vain all poetry and glory. All there is, is to worship 
Helen in silence, 

* To master our dream and keep silence for ever." 

Helen appears. But the glory of her form is veiled. 
The poet knows he shall not see her splendour un- 
veiled, shall not gaze, rapt, at the ineffable Absolute 
of God. 

*' I am," she declares, " queen of Sparta and queen 
of Troy. All life yearns to me. I am Helen whom 
all poets loved and wise men worshipped. If I threw 
off my veil that stands between thee and thy desire , 
the fire of my unveiled form would burn all life 
away." 

For who are Helen and Yeldis but the fulness of 
life for which men live and endure all sorrows and all 
illusions, that joy ,which beckons them an instant in 
the eyes of the Beloved, not her, but for the moment 
dwelling in her? 

* The touch of glory in the sunset-west, 
The indefinable essential thing, 
The poet's dream, the halo round a God, 
The hope upraising man to deity, 
The fragrance of all flowers, and the light 
That shines on morning seas, the quietude 
Of night, bestrewn with points of fire, the joy 
That rises leaping in a living heart, 
The blood within the chalice, and the bread 
The priest has blessed, vice-regently for God 
— All these you are, and you are more than these/ 9 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 119 

says the poet, addressing Helen — " Tis life I seek, 

" Life, only life, ineffable, unknown, 
Eternal life that lives when all is dead, 
Surviving worlds, and men, that princes give 
Gladly their crowns for, and their place on Earth 
And all the pomp of their half-God-like throne, 
And poets give their laurels, casting down 
The world's praise and all beauty at your feet, 
And turn divinely to the Orient star 
That rises in the infinite of your face!** 

Welland the Smith, in Viele-Grifhn's poem of that 
name, learned to conceive of life as an unceasing 
search, an unquenchable thirst : 

** For there is no rest for a soul 
Drunken with immense desire : 
No sword wrought in the flame, « 
Nor holy love of a woman, 
Nor art with its crown of glory, 
Appease the hunger of life.** 

Phocas the gardener dared not sacrifice his 
memories and illusions. He would not put aside his 
past life and break the glittering gate beyond him. 
A Christian by birth and early associations, he could 
not make up his mind to renounce a faith he did not 
believe and accept the life and love offered him by the 
paganism that he really felt in his heart. Paganism 
and Thalia on the one hand, death on the other ! He 
died a martyr to a faith that was not his because he 
could not like the poet of La Partenza, brace himself 
to abandon all old things and go unflinching 



120 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

" upon the opening road 
Toward the wide green sea.'* 

He died the irrevocable and irredeemable death — in 
time and eternity, for he refused to be himself, refused 
to follow life whithersoever it led. 

For he who would live, who would be fully him- 
self, gaze on the naked glory of Helen, look on God 
in the face of His light must lay down all old and dis- 
used ideals and outworn desires for ever — times 
without number ! 

And that is why Viele-Grimn has written the stories 
of Saint Julia and Saint Dominantia and the other 
virgin martyrs who loved life so well, and so in- 
timately felt its true meaning, that they followed it, 
joyfully, in the fulness of love and beauty, even to 
death and the burning crown. Not because Life is 
nothing to them, as to some sour ascetic brooding like 
the Preacher on the vanity of all things, blaspheming 
God in the holiest of his works, but because Life is 
all, the only thing that is or can be, and the very 
breath of creative energy itself, they follow it whither 
it leads, and in the ineffable call to martyrdom hear 
the clarions of hope undying, and beyond the flames 
the goal of self -hood to be won at last. 

Dominantia, daughter of a king, riding on her white 
palfrey to the court of her betrothed, laughing and 
singing as she goes, reaches Saragossa, her first halt, 
at nightfall. She finds the town drunken with the 
blood of Christians, victims of Roman justice, admin- 
istered by a brutal Praetor. 

Without a moment's hesitation, young and frail and 
lovely, the Princess rides through the yelling crowd „ 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 12* 

past the executioners, proudly and calmly, till she 
stops beneath the Praetor's throne, and beseeching 
and reproaching by turns, calls on him in the name 
of God, in the name of the Roman Peace, to desist — 
threatens, commands, implores, and suddenly stops 
short, terrified at her own audacity. 

The obscene Praetor, leering and sneering, con- 
demns Dominantia, as penalty for her insult to the 
majesty of Rome, to kiss him. 

And as the crowd, brutal like its master, laughing 
and cheering, crowds to see, the Princess, without a 
word, raising her arm, brings down her riding whip 
full in the Praetor's face, tearing his flesh with its 
thong. 

She was burned with all her escort at the stake, her 
pride and her courage unshaken, and her soul, it is 
said, rose to Heaven on a fiery charger. 

The story of Saint Julia is put in the mouth of her 
lover, who, having bought her at Carthage from the 
Vandals, and coming to love her day by day with 

" some sweet, sad, far-off love " 

was taking her home on his ship. Her martyrdom at 
the hands of a band of drunken merchants, at Cyrnos, 
on the feast-day of Cybele, is told so convincingly and 
beautifully that we see her for ever standing, 

** Grave, with brown hair flowing 

Between the burning torches and the moon." 

Her lover tells the tale to a priest, and, scornfully, 
asks : 



122 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

'* You who call upon her on your knees, 
What do you know of her? What did you ever 

know ? 
Only that they killed her like cowards, 
That she witnessed to Christ beneath the lash 
Till death ! That is enough for you, 
For your hymns sung 
To pale, ascetic virgins floating on unsubstantial 

clouds ; 
But I, I saw her live ! 
I kissed the cheek they struck. 
Do you think I am mad? 

Do you think I will praise Christ for her death? 
But let me be a Christian in my way, 
For I loved her truly, 
Day by day and hour by hour ! 
I pray to her and love her without sacrilege 
I pray to her and weep.** 



IV. 

This " believer,* * this Catholic, is no less the fervent 
apostle of passionate life in its intensity of energy and 
will, than the atheist Merrill, who has cursed ** la 
feroce idole des pretres," or Rette who saw, in his 
unregenerate days, "les brasiers nourris d'or des eglises 
en flammes." The throb of reality is beneath the 
various garments of their thought; the wind of life 
blows free behind the arras of their verse, and all, 
and many others with them, have shaken free from the 
trapping of death and despair the gorgeous or the wist- 
ful or the burning burden of their song. Conversion, 
acceptance, faith, heads bowed to the Babe of Bethle- 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 123 

hem, perhaps, but only in so far as the Babe of 
Bethlehem is the avatar of that evolving, ever-becom- 
ing God, with whom we and all life are bound up for 
ever, growing to birth and being as He, for ever-chang- 
ing, wins ever nearer to His own ultimate completion 
in the changeless light of Absolute Being. 

Viele-Grifnn abhors all that is opposed to life in 
its fulness. While Merrill is called a Socialist and a 
Free Thinker, Viele-Grifnn is a Catholic and a re- 
actionary. He detests the spurious democracy of the 
French radicals who blaspheme against all great and 
noble ideals, 

" qui te blasphement, 
O Christ, Dieu de douleur, Dieu supreme.** 

The poet whose heart is ** bleeding with the hymn 
of life and death and resurrection " can, indeed, look 
with scant sympathy on " the foul, grovelling, 
blaspheming mob ** which, in France, affects the 
Socialist doctrine. He knows that democracy, with 
its machinery of representation of fools by knaves, has 
reaped the harvest it deserves. It has made possible 
and profitable the appeal to the folly and passion of 
the Mob — that Mob, gullible in proportion as greed 
has blunted the little wit it has left after the systematic 
destruction of all qualities of brain and character 
which we miscall education, that Mob which is so 
utterly unlike the People, sanely occupied in the pro- 
duction of real wealth and humanised by contact with 
nature, innately loving beauty and justice, to whom 
Viele-Grifnn declares the poet must go, not to teach 
but to learn. 



124 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

And yet what Socialist could inveigh more fervently, 
with more burning eloquence against the hideous 
squalor and horror of industrialism than this same 
Viele-Grimn who, telling of the suicide of a factory- 
boy, declares : 

** Best die as thou diest, I believe, 
Best turn aside from our shame. 
. . . Take death rather, 
Know how to die without fear. 
. Tremble not, be strong 
In thy disdain 
And spurn the life they offer, starving child !** 

No revolutionary could have thrown more con- 
tumely upon the society of to-day with its venal 
patriotism of the bank and the exchange than this 
reactionary, this clerical, who with consuming scorn, 
tells us that this poor factory-boy, died for his country 
— ** est mort pour la patrie," for the fatherland of all 
great spirits, for life itself and God the fountain-head 
of life :— 

" For life is fair and holy, 
Life is joy and pain and mystery, 
And to die, as thbu diedst, without fear, 
We must love the dream of life : 
They lied who said life was 
Only a little mortal bread and wine; 
They killed thee thrice, denying 
Love and God and thy humanity ; 
But if they made thy life according to their shame, 
Refusing the life they offer, thou conquerest them. 






FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 125 

** As surely as swords and torches 
Brandished at palace-gates, 
Better than the harvest of hate 
— Corn trampled in the furrow, 
Crowds stamped by the feet of the horses, 
Better than the sea of tears . . . 
Thy death is a protest, a tremor of dawn 
Risen over Golgotha still bleeding ! ' * 

All Viele-Grimn's work is a hymn to life, and the 
burden of it all is this : 

** Croyez, sachez, criez a pleine voix, 
Que F Amour est vainqueur et que TEspoir est roi ! 

Life is a cup, full to the brim, without lees, a 
sacramental chalice, filled with more than mortal 
wine. We and all life with us are bound up for ever 
with God, and we hear, in Griffin's verse, no longer 
the " long roaring of eternal life,*' no longer despair 
and shame and horror, but the paean of hope and 
victory, and of ultimate self-realisation in the absolute 
of God. 

V. 

I met Viele-Grimn for the first time, in 1902, in 
Stuart Merrill's study, high up among the tree tops of 
the He de Saint-Louis. Through the open window 
came the points of light dancing on the Seine and the 
subdued gay hum of the great city. We were all 
talking : our voices rose higher and higher. Griffin 
was sitting alone, in a corner by the window, looking 
out over the town. Perhaps his eyes looked on Saint- 



126 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

Dominantia in Barcelona, or Saint-Julia "between the 
burning torches and the moon.'* Perhaps lost in the 
splendour of her tresses his passionate lips were laid 
on Helen's. He was with us, but he was different 
from any of us. He had no part, even outwardly, in 
the Symbolist Bohemia. Indeed he rarely appeared 
in the haunts of the poets. Paul Fort might be seen in 
almost all the cafes of the quartier any evening : above 
all at the Closerie des Lilas opposite Bullier, where he 
did his best to drown his unique genius in bad alcohol, 
between Moreas and the Norwegian, Diriks. Merrill 
had not yet withdrawn from the fellowship. He did 
not do so at all till 1906 and not altogether till his 
second marriage in 1908. But Griffin already in 1902 
lived a life apart, in his flat on the Quai de Passy and 
in his Chateau near Poitiers. He was a grand 
seigneur and a manufacturer of motor cars : a pillar of 
the Church and a devoted husband and father. He 
lived in some mystic sunlit garden : his high serious- 
ness and intensity were attracted by no other intoxica- 
tion than that of joy and belief. For him, as for 
Francis Thompson 

** On Golgotha there grew a thorn 
Round the long prefigured Brows." 

I first read Yeldis and Helen under the great trees of 
the lie Verte at Grenoble, looking out over the shining 
river at the mountains of the Grande Charteuse, white 
and dazzling in the sunlight, crowned with forests and 
bearing in their depths green valleys full of flowers. 
I took them with me through the infinite fields of 
myriad bloom, heavy with the hot perfume of exotic 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 127 

spices, along valleys ablaze with peach and 
pomegranate, and in the darkness of burning nights 
that set the blood afire. 

" Rejouis toi et sache croire *' 

I cried, exultingly, as I walked the stony, dusty roads 
of Dauphiny, sunk in banks of violets and slopes of 
orchid and asphodel, where I thought every moment 
to meet the Son of Man as of old in Palestine, and 
would raise my eyes from the hot fragrance and the 
insistent passion of the valleys to the high rim of the 
cold white mountain ridge above the belts of pines, 
or the rushing torrent of surging peaks that fled like 
a herd of buffaloes towards Italy, a mile above my 
head : till I knew not if the body were spirit or the 
spirit desire. 

There, in that wonderful South, all life is seared 
with joy, joy as terrible as grief : the soul may be 
drunken with sorrow as with wine, and spring to 
new life in the very joy of pain : passion burns with 
an ineffable fire. Life is a golden cup, full to the 
brim, overflowing with intensity. Ready to drink it 
to the dregs, joy and passion and pain, I found, as I 
thought, the very image of it in the poems of Griffin. 
I went with Helen in my soul along the willows by the 
streams, or among the orchids and holly of the hills. 
I saw her hair unbound float on the night-wind and I 
steeped myself in the perfume of her breath. I took 
her even to the examination hall and won my doctorate 
partly in spite of one of the subjects I had chosen : the 
poetry of Viele-Griffm, which I expounded to Pro- 
fessors of Phonetics and French Literature : the only 



128 FRENCH LITERARY STUDIES 

one who understood me and has remained to this day 
my friend and master was Georges Dumesnil — whom I 
mention with all honour and respect and reverence — 
the Professor of Philosophy and Education, a Conser- 
vative of the best tradition, a fervent and whole-hearted 
Catholic, who, walking with me along the infinite 
avenues of Grenoble, spoke with sadness unspeakable 
of the ruin that had come over France with the ex- 
pulsion of the monks and the persecution of the 
Church, and likened the brown leaves falling from the 
trees to the true conception of life leaving France bare 
of all virtue and honour and hope. His were a true 
heart and a great soul. I cannot refuse to him the 
distinction of being, amidst a Radical and unbelieving 
Faculty, the one man of real understanding and of 
unflinching conviction and nobility, unable to stoop 
or to dream of stooping to any act or thought unworthy 
of what he believed to be the high heritage of the 
Catholic Church and of the French race. 

He understood, and yet he knew where I was mis- 
taken; he knew that my conception of life was too 
material. He knew, what I did not discover till 1909, 
in Griffin's own country, that I had misread, in one 
essential feature, the attitude of my favourite poet. 
Viele-Griffin loves life : loves it with intensity : but 
the fire that burns his soul is the white fire of the 
spirit, not the red fire of youth aglow with passionate 
acceptance of the blazing South. 

The poems of Viele-Griffin are full of sunlight and 
the scent of flowers, brimming with the joyous life of 
France his mother, overflowing with all the loveliness 
of her smiling countrysides. The flowers, the burning 
noons and nights of France, white roads and forests 



FRANCIS VIELE-GRIFFIN 129 

and sleeping hamlets and mistletoe in the apple trees, 
songs borne on the night-wind and laughter on the gay 
lips of the beloved — all that is in them. Whoever has 
learnt to love the sunlight and the shadow of the 
French lands, the sorrow and joy of their children, will 
turn ever and again to the pages of Viele-Grimn, so 
that he may look into the deep eyes of France and see 
her smiling, sad and distant, under the branches of 
her chestnut trees. 

But that is not all. The life he sings, with which 
his whole being trembles, is not the uprising of the 
victorious blood under the sun of Provence or 
Dauphiny in a crude gorgeous setting of asphodel on 
mountain fields and gentian on white limestone rocks 
and at night the moon full on peach and pomegranate 
blossom and the song of the children of joy. 

I did not understand until I went to Griffin's own 
country and looked on the sunset through the stained 
glass windows of Tours Cathedral and saw the broad 
Loire flow towards the west on the plain past a pure 
white city. I sank myself in the clear spirituality of 
Notre-Dame de Nantilly, silent and white, amid the 
peace and austerity of Saumur : and then I knew 
that for the life which Griffin knew princes would give 
their crowns and poets their laurels and that all beauty 
and praise of Earth are but offerings cast at the feet 
of the ineffable and invincible Beauty of the Helen the 
poet sang. 



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